Introduction
This manual is prepared to guide you in the laboratory course, NSC/PSY 3111, Laboratory in Cognition. As such, this manual will provide you with some background information and theoretical implications of various experiments that have shaped the field and contributed to our ever-expanding knowledge of how human cognition works. The manual also includes data sheets on which you will record your individual results, to be turned in to your lab instructor as a part of your overall lab report. The computer portion of the lab uses the COGLAB 5 software package available in the bookstore. The lab will have exercises in addition to the ones included in the COGLAB software.
One of the nicest features about COGLAB is that it is a self-contained series of programs that can be completed at your pace, at your convenience. Therefore, the weekly class meetings will be brief. In addition to the scheduled meeting times, though, you will need to find an hour or so every week when you can run the assigned exercises and complete whatever work is associated with that lab exercise. So long as the computer you’re using is connected to the internet, your results will automatically be submitted to the instructor.
It is virtually impossible to get a real “feel” for what an experiment in Cognition is all about without actually participating. Therefore, with most of these exercises, you will be the subject. Of course, your responses will be completely anonymous, and no one will be able to find out how any other person performed. However, you must participate in each experiment to get credit. If you fail to complete the experiment, you will fail that part of the lab.
The Laboratory in Cognition works much like the lab that many of you completed for 1106 (Intro to Neuroscience). Most of the experiments take no more than an hour of computer time (the estimated time for each experiment is listed on the COGLAB website). The software is easy to use once you get it set up. If you have any questions, you can always contact your lab instructor.
The software you will need for the computer-based labs come with the COGLAB access card you buy in the bookstore or online. This access card allows you to create an account to log in to COGLAB from any computer which meets the operating system requirements. If you don’t have a computer or tablet that can run the software, you should use the available computers in the library or neuroscience computer lab. After you participate in an experiment, the program will automatically submit your data to the instructor. Still, you must turn in the data sheets included in your lab manual to the instructor with your Lab Report. In some cases, the data sheets require you to perform calculations not made by the software package. The data sheets are part of the lab. Failure to turn in data sheets will result in a 0 for that lab. You should print out the data provided by the software package so that you can refer to it when completing your lab reports.
The lab instructor will collate the class data and return it to you via the Canvas course page. You will use these data to complete your lab reports.
Introduction to the Lab Exercises
As mentioned before, the lab is a combination of computer-based exercises (using the COGLABo software) and several classroom demonstrations. In each of these labs, you will participate as subjects in experiments that are modeled after actual experiments conducted during the past few years. Some of the labs you will do are based on research that could be considered “classic” research; that is, these are some of the landmark studies in the history of cognitive psychology.
By participating as a subject, you’ll get a feel of what the actual experiments are like in a way that reading about them doesn’t allow. Much, perhaps most, cognitive research these days is done by computer-controlled experimentation. For example, if you participated in any research in Dr. Weaver’s lab in past semesters, you very likely completed an experiment using a computer. These type of experiments allow researchers to collect data quickly, offer precise control of experimental manipulations, and provide fast, accurate logging of data. In fact, it is not uncommon for experimenters to download data onto a disk, analyze the data using some kind of computerized statistical software (like SAS or SPSS), and printout a report of the results in the same day.
Overview of the Experiments
Each of the studies you are participating in is based on an experiment that cognitive researchers have previously conducted. One of the goals will be to see if we can replicate (repeat) the results that the previous investigators collected. Much of the time we will. Sometimes we will not. If we don’t get similar results, there are often good reasons why. One of your jobs will be to determine those reasons. There usually isn’t a single correct answer—many things can disrupt an experiment.
Every time you go to the lab you’ll need to bring this lab manual. In the manual are data sheets on which you will write your individual results, and hand in to the lab assistants. When all the students in the class have completed the lab, we will collate the data and hand them out to you in class.
Each lab involving the software has instructions on how to perform the tasks in the COGLAB lab webpage. Most of the experimental tasks are quite easy (such as deciding if a sentence is correct or not, or learning a list of words) and the programs are easy to follow. However, you’ll need to have your lab manual with you so that you will understand what the computer is asking you to do.
We will be doing many, but not all, of the experimental lab sections in the COGLAB package. Since you are the subjects in these experiments, it is important that you be naive when you participate. That is, you should not know how we expect the results to come out. That’s hard to do, since you will have read sections about the lab before coming in. The best advice: Don’t try to guess the point of the experiment. Most of these are relatively simple memory exercises, where you are given a list of words to remember, or are asked to make some kind of judgments. Just do your best and react as honestly as you can. Also, remember that your grade is in no way influenced by your performance on the tests. In fact, you are expected to make errors–that’s the whole point of the experiment.
It’s also true that the experiments will not work unless you are attentive and are motivated to do well. Some of the experiments involve very subtle differences, and if you are not paying attention, the experiment will not work as it was designed.
When everyone has completed the experiment, the lab assistant will pass out to you a summary of the data, which you will then use to help answer your questions. We will try to synchronize the lab schedule and the lecture schedule, but this will not always be possible.
The lab instructor will show you how to work the equipment during the first lab meeting. The programs are really quite simple to use, and the experiments take no more than an hour. The lab instructor will post office hours during which (s)he will be available to assist you, though you likely will not need any help.
Collection of Data
You will collect data during these experiments in two different ways. First, the manual has data summary sheets in them that you will complete. You will need to write down your totals on this sheet, be certain that your name is on it, and include it when you turn in your lab report. In addition, we will collect data electronically. The program will automatically send the results of your completed experiment to the instructor when you are finished. **Obviously, this won’t happen if the computer you are using isn’t connected to the internet.** The lab instructor will use your submitted data to tally the class results.
The COGLAB software gives you the option of printing out your data and accompanying graphs. You should also utilize this option to have another record of your data that can help you when completing your lab reports.
A reminder: You will NOT receive credit for a lab report if you do not participate in the accompanying experiment and submit data to the instructor.
1The word “data” is plural. The singular of “data” is “datum.” Learn that now. You should be saying, “the data are” and not “the data is.” A good rule of thumb to help you remember this is to substitute the word “numbers” or “results” for “data.”
2Using other techniques, we can estimate how you do this task. You probably do perform this task as it seems, by mentally imagining the house and counting the windows.
3This is what we call a speed-accuracy trade-off. When you increase your speed, your accuracy suffers. You are familiar with this in the classroom. You have taken very long tests, and you know you’ll have to work quickly to get finished on time. But you know that as you speed up, you are more likely to make mistakes. As accuracy goes up, speed goes down, and visa versa.
4Another example: There is a strong relationship in large cities between sales of ice cream cones and suicide rates. You are the mayor: would you consider a ban on ice cream?
5Whenever we study something like “aggression,” we have to come up with way to objectively measure it. The process of doing this is called “operationalization,” and the way we are measuring aggression is the
operational definition. Our operational definition of aggression is violent acts towards the Coke machine. As you are reading research throughout the semester, remember that all operational definitions are not equal! Sometimes we don’t do a very good job of measuring what we are trying to measure…
6This is a real experiment. How would you anticipate the results to come out? The answer might surprise you…
7Try this yourself. Next time you are listening to newscast on the radio, try to repeat back everything you hear, as soon as you hear it. You’ll probably find that with a little practice, you can do it, but it is very attention-consuming.
8The recent evidence on unconscious perception (sometimes called “subliminal perception”) backs Norman up. It is not always necessary for you to be aware of something in order for it to influence your behavior.
9One thing that has made the Macintosh computer so successful is that the commands to do most common tasks are the same across many different programs. If you learn how to operate one program, you know a great deal about how to operate others.
10This search is only possible if you have relatively few lime green pieces of clothing. If you do have a lot of lime green clothing, not being able to perform a parallel search is the least of your problems…
11This reminds me of an old joke. Two hunters were in the jungle, when suddenly they encountered a very hungry tiger. The two men immediately began running as quickly as they could. After a few minutes, the first hunter sat down on the ground and began removing his boots. The second hunter also stopped, and asked the first hunter, “What in the world are you doing?!?” The first hunter replied, “I’m removing my boots. I can run faster without my boots.” The second hunter got a bewildered look on his face, and said, “Are you crazy!? You can’t outrun a tiger!” The first hunter didn’t stop removing his boots, but looked up and said, “I don’t have to outrun the tiger. I just have to outrun you.”What’s the point of this story? I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s related. How fast would a “search and check, search and check…” search be? I don’t know, but I do know that a “search, search, search…one check” must be faster.
12More recent work has shown that your mental map probably better reflects the “time to travel” rather than the literal Euclidean distance. For example, few people in Colorado realize that the Winter Park ski area is physically only a few miles from the city of Boulder. However, they are on opposite sides of the mountain, such that driving from Boulder to Winter Park takes several hours because you have to literally drive around the mountain. When asked to estimate, most people assume that Boulder and Winter Park are much farther apart than they really are.This is so true that if you ask a friend how far it is from Waco to Dallas, they might well say, “Oh, about two hours.”
13Though James referred to “primary memory” and “secondary memory,” his ideas are quite consistent with our more recent labels.
14 Of course, Maris’s record was broken by Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1998, when Big Mac hit 70 (and Sammy Sosa hit 66). Since then, Barry Bonds has broken McGwire’s record by hitting 73 homers in 2001. Given the recent steroid investigations, though, the legacies of McGwire and Bonds are uncertain.
15This will be examined in considerable detail in the lab on Recall, Recognition, and the Encoding Specificity Principle.
16Though see the last lab on flashbulb memory for an interesting exception!
17Honus Wagner was a Hall of Fame shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates around the turn of the century. Around that time it was common for tobacco companies to put trading cards with players’ pictures on them in their packages. One such company did that with Wagner’s picture. However, Wagner was a very outspoken critic of tobacco, and demanded his card be removed from all packages. Therefore, only a few were issued, and only 12 exist today. How much is it worth? The card was recently sold for $1.27 million. Where does one buy a million dollar baseball card? On E-Bay, of course.You now have a new semantic memory.
18It’s worth noting that few cognitive scientists consider Deep Blue’s victory all that important. The performance of chess-playing programs has always been constrained by the huge number of possible moves that must be evaluated for each move: searching just one level (one “move”) requires the examination of 64 possibilities. To search two levels (its move and an opponent’s counter-move), requires searching 4096 moves (642). Searching 3 levels requires searching 262,144 moves (643), and so on. However, with each technological advance computers become faster and more powerful; as a result they are able to evaluate more and more possibilities. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before a computer defeated a grand master.
19The first part of a sentence used in these experiment is called the “subject” and the second part is called the “predicate.” In “A robin is a bird,” “robin” would be the subject and “is a bird” would be the predicate.
20Don’t feel too smug, you American, you. We don’t do much better. Nickerson and Adams (1976) had Americans draw the penny, and we fared almost as bad. Give it a try–draw the front of a penny without looking.
21If you don’t know the answer, please don’t ask me; I feel old enough as it is..
22In his later work, Tulving distinguished a third kind of memory–procedural memory. Procedural memory (also sometimes referred to as implicit memory, by those wishing to be “theoretically neutral”) is your memory for events that don’t necessarily require conscious recollection, like memories for how to ride a bike. In fact, one of the ways to impair those kinds of memories is to make them subject to conscious recollection. Next time your are playing golf or tennis with a friend, ask them if they breathe on their upswing (or as they are tossing the ball to serve). Chances are they won’t know, and by making them attend to it, you can make their performance suffer.If you remember our brief discussion of H. M. in Lab 1, you might remember that I told you he had been unable to form any new long-term memories since his surgery in the early 1950s. This is technically not true. He is able to form new procedural memories. That is, he can learn things, but has no realization that he has learned them. We’ll discuss this in more detail in Lab 10.
23In his later work, Tulving distinguished a third kind of memory–procedural memory. Procedural memory (also sometimes referred to as implicit memory, by those wishing to be “theoretically neutral”) is your memory for events that don’t necessarily require conscious recollection, like memories for how to ride a bike. In fact, one of the ways to impair those kinds of memories is to make them subject to conscious recollection. Next time your are playing golf or tennis with a friend, ask them if they breathe on their upswing (or as they are tossing the ball to serve). Chances are they won’t know, and by making them attend to it, you can make their performance suffer.If you remember our brief discussion of H. M. in Lab 1, you might remember that I told you he had been unable to form any new long-term memories since his surgery in the early 1950s. This is technically not true. He is able to form new procedural memories. That is, he can learn things, but has no realization that he has learned them. We’ll discuss this in more detail in Lab 10.
24These are largely similar to tests of what Tulving (1985) calls “procedural memory,”, though there are some important theoretical distinctions implied by the name one chooses.
25A colleague of mine has told me that his subjects–well-dressed freshmen at a well-known university in Dallas–spell so poorly that he now just asks them to use the word in a sentence.
26If you ever do have a final exam consisting solely of word fragments, let me know. I want to be there when the professor who did that to you gets fired.
27 Our graduate school team, coached by our statistics professor, was named—I am not making this up—the “Standard Deviates.” We were sufficiently good that we wonder the Boulder City League championship one year.
28The obvious flashbulb memory events from your generation are the World Trade Center attacks and destruction. In fact, probably no event since the Kennedy assassination in 1963 was so well remembered by so many. We found that memories of 9/11/2001 were indeed quite good, but we also found that what distinguishes them is their long-term consistency, not their accuracy. That is, people’s memories changed somewhat in the first few weeks after 9/11/2001, but once their memories of that day were formed in the minds, they tended to stay that way. The best predictor of people’s memory one year later was their memory 3 months after the event, not their memory immediately after the event happened (Weaver & Krug, in press).