Projects in experimental psychology: Software for several classical perception experiments

Projects in Experimental Psychology (Sorkin, 1997) is a Windows-based series of nine classical perception experiments. It is primarily designed for laboratory use in perception and related courses. The program is generally simple to use and exploits the “point-and-click” features of Windows quite well. It complements, rather than competes with, Levy and Ransdell’s (1998) Laboratory in Cognition and Perception, which is more suitable for courses in memory. Projects can be extremely useful in laboratory courses in perception and cognition, although the number and range of studies may presently be too limited to be the exclusive source of data in these courses. Although instructors proficient with experiment generators such as MEL (Schneider, 1998) or ERTS (Beringer, 1992) may opt to design their own experiments, this is an excellent alternative for those who lack the time or the background to do so.     

The internet, cyberporn, and sexual exploitation of children: Media moral panics and urban myths for middle-class parents?

The Internet as a popular media is not even one decade old. From its early days of wide access, concern with the dangers posed to children and teens has been a staple of news media and moral entrepreneurs. Concern with sexual predators, “cyberporn” (or “pornographic” material housed on “nodes” of the World Wide Web) became media-induced moral panics of the mid- and late-1990s. This paper examined the Internet and children in the context of the United States and Australia. Studies of children’s access to the Internet and it’s effects were examined. Particular attention was paid to the aspects of Internet danger as a form of “urban legend” aimed at middle-class parents who are able to provide access to the technology required to access the “dangers” of the Web. The intersection of urban mythology, technological change, and morals campaigns of the 1990s was explored. The role played by concern with the Internet in the on-going history of moral movements and parental responsibility was discussed.     

The Psychology Graduate Applicant’s Portal (www.psychgrad.org)

Applying to graduate school in psychology can be an intimidating process. Many obstacles must be overcome, such as applying to a program appropriate to the specific applicant, getting good GRE scores, submitting a clear and well-written statement of purpose, and obtaining letters of recommendation, to name just a few. Much information is available to assist applicants in these tasks, but finding this information can cause problems even for experienced Internet users. The goal of this project is to create an easily accessible Web clearing house of information on applying to graduate school in psychology. This Web site, called the Psychology Graduate Applicant’s Portal (or PsychGrad.org), contains targeted links to other Web pages with valuable information, book recommendations on the application process, polls to measure issues important to the graduate applicants, site-unique advice on graduate programs, a message board to exchange information and experiences, and other information relevant to the application process.     

A perception experiment with time-critical graphics animation on the World-Wide Web

The World-Wide Web offers a potentially interesting tool to collect data from a large and heterogeneous audience. While questionnaires have become rather common on the Internet, its potential reaches far beyond text processing. In principle, it is possible not only to perform interactive, dynamic experiments on the Web, but also to include graphical animation and time-critical responses, such as reaction times. We implemented a visual motion extrapolation task on the Web using the programming language Java, which can be interpreted by standard Web browsers such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. The data collected with this method turned out to be reliable and differed little from data obtained in a controlled laboratory setting, with the exception of conditions with fixation instruction. Thus, the Web can, generally speaking, be used for data collection of large sample sizes. The strengths and weaknesses of dynamic visual simulation experiments on the Internet are discussed.     

Mining twitter: A source for psychological wisdom of the crowds

Over the last few years, microblogging has gained prominence as a form of personal broadcasting media where information and opinion are mixed together without an established order, usually tightly linked with current reality. Location awareness and promptness provide researchers using the Internet with the opportunity to create “psychological landscapes”—that is, to detect differences and changes in voiced (twittered) emotions, cognitions, and behaviors. In our article, we present iScience Maps, a free Web service for researchers, available from and . Technologically, the service is based on Twitter’s streaming and search application programming interfaces (APIs), accessed through several PHP libraries, and a JavaScript frontend. This service allows researchers to assess via Twitter the effect of specific events in different places as they are happening and to make comparisons between cities, regions, or countries regarding psychological states and their evolution in the course of an event. In a step-by-step example, it is shown how to replicate a study on affective and personality characteristics inferred from first names (Mehrabian & Piercy, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 755–758 1993) by mining Twitter data with iScience Maps.Results from the original study are replicated in both world regions we tested (the western U.S. and the U.K./Ireland); we also discover base rate of names to be a confound that needs to be controlled for in future research.     

Gender Differences in the Use of the Internet by English Secondary School Children

Access to the Internet is an important issue in terms of equity and the UK government has stated ‘Our goal is to ensure that everyone who wants it has access to the Internet by 2005.’ (UK Online Annual Report, 2002). This survey of Internet use by 1340 secondary school students from four schools in the Teesside area of England was carried out in order to assess whether the government is realising its ambition of Internet access amongst 11–16 year-olds, and also to determine whether or not gender differences exist in Internet use. Furthermore, the data supplied are intended to inform later studies of more specific aspects of children's Internet use. Generally, it was found that most children used the Internet, were quite comfortable with it, and used it for a variety of applications. However, a considerable minority of respondents also considered themselves non-users of the Internet. There were also some gender differences found in the data which in general suggested something of a male bias towards Internet use. It was concluded that these are issues that need to be addressed for the purposes of equity and if the government is to achieve its goal of Internet access for all by 2005. A number of suggestions for further research into Internet use by children are also suggested in this paper.     

A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a Web application that provides instant access to thousands of potential participants for survey-based psychology experiments, such as the acceptability judgment task used extensively in syntactic theory. Because AMT is a Web-based system, syntacticians may worry that the move out of the experimenter-controlled environment of the laboratory and onto the user-controlled environment of AMT could adversely affect the quality of the judgment data collected. This article reports a quantitative comparison of two identical acceptability judgment experiments, each with 176 participants (352 total): one conducted in the laboratory, and one conducted on AMT. Crucial indicators of data quality—such as participant rejection rates, statistical power, and the shape of the distributions of the judgments for each sentence type—are compared between the two samples. The results suggest that aside from slightly higher participant rejection rates, AMT data are almost indistinguishable from laboratory data.     

Perelman’s Audience Revisted: Towards the Construction of a New Type of Audience

This article asks whether Perelman’s concepts of the audience can help us achieve a better understanding of the Internet Audience in the specific context of the recent French and American presidential elections. It concludes that Perelman’s notion of “argumentation before a single hearer” is most useful for that purpose. Applying it to Internet audience allows us to discern some of the communicative devices, such as appeal to participation and appeal to proximity, used by candidates in order to achieve a higher degree of involvement on the part of the surfers and potential voters, which in turn is translated to action by the surfers/voters on behalf of the candidate. The application of Perelman’s concept shows that on the Web the interaction between the candidate and the surfer shifts from an argumentative situation per se to a context in which what appears to be a dialogue or conversation invites connivance between rhetor and audience.

The legacy of Adolf Meyer’s comparative approach: Worcester rats and the strange birth of the animal model

The breeding of albino rats had an enormous impact on experimental psychology in the twentieth century: Rats were, and for many questions still remain, the “standard animal” for laboratory research in neurology, psychology, and physiology. Albert Meyer was one of the figures most responsible for developing the albino rat as an experimental model. Despite Meyer’s pioneering work with albino rats, his rat research has received only sparse attention. Little is known about the way in which the animal served Meyer’s more famous psychiatric program. In this article, the author discusses the role that albino rats played in Meyer’s animal research. He then turn to the contrast between the way in which Meyer viewed the animal’s role in research and the way rats were later used as a laboratory “standard” to assure scientific generality. This comparison highlights the changes that occurred in comparative psychology in the twentieth century, and it further clarifies some of the concerns associated with the use of animal models today. Reprinted from Jaan Valsiner (ed.).Thinking in Psychological Science: Ideas and Their Makers. Transaction Publishers. Previously published inFrom Past to Future, Vol. 4(1),Animal models in human psychology: The uses of comparative methodologies, pp. 23–36. @ 2003 Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology, Clark University. Author: Cheryl A. Logan, Ph.D., Departments of Psychology and Biology, P. O. Box 26170, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greansboro, NC. The author is graterful for permission to quote from the Adolf Meyer papers, which was granted by The Alan M. Chesney Medical Archives at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.     

Animated Bodies in Immunological Practices: Craftsmanship,Embodied Knowledge,Emotions and Attitudes Toward Animals

Taking up the body turn in sociology, this paper discusses scientific practices as embodied action from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenological theory of the “Body”. Based on ethnographic data on a biology laboratory it will discuss the importance of the scientist’s Body for the performance of scientific activities. Successful researchers have to be skilled workers using their embodied knowledge for the process of tinkering towards the material transformation of their objects for data production. The researcher’s body then is an instrument of measuring as well as a kind of archive of knowing. Their body becomes a disciplined instrument which has its own place and function inside the laboratory. Furthermore, the appresentational apperception of Bodies (Husserl) is being discussed as a basis for the emotional and ethical concerns towards laboratory-animals. Attitudes towards animals in the laboratory setting (as well as elsewhere) are highly emotional. Nevertheless, following the literature of the sociology of the body, those emotional reactions still follow certain cultural patterns which themselves can be understood as embodied ways of knowing “right” or “wrong”. Besides as an instrument, the scientist’s body can also be understood as a resource of emotional attachment towards animals. It is an instrument for performing transformation as well as one for caring.     

Human factors in GIScience laboratory at the Pennsylvania State University

The human factors in GIScience Laboratory (Human Factors Lab) of The Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Geography is located in University Park, PA (USA). University Park and bordering State College, PA are found in the heart of PA between the cities of New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, and Pittsburgh, PA. The laboratory is directed by Dr. Alexander Klippel and is part of the GeoVISTA Center. The Human Factors Lab contributes to Penn State Geography’s strong tradition as a leader in research on map perception, spatial cognition, and behavior in spatial environments. This report focuses upon basic research topics in spatial cognition, including: (1) perceptual and cognitive factors in map symbolization and design, (2) the creation of cognitively ergonomic route directions for next generation location based services (LBS), (3) You-Are-Here maps and the creation of a sense of place through map-like representations, (4) the conceptualization and representation of dynamic phenomena (i.e., geographic movement pattern), and (5) the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic conceptualization.     

WebDiP: A tool for information search experiments on the World-Wide Web

We describe WebDiP (Web Decision Processes)—an open-source, online tool—which enables a researcher to track participants while they search for information in a database, available through the Internet. After various instructions on setup and configuration are given, a detailed view of WebDiP explains the system’s technical features. Furthermore, other open-source tools are mentioned that helped in programming WebDiP, running it, or analyzing data gathered with it. We present new approaches of how open-source thinking can be incorporated into a research process and discuss future perspectives of WebDiP.     

Timing accuracy of Web experiments: A case study using the WebExp software package

Although Internet-based experiments are gaining in popularity, most studies rely on directly evaluating participants’ responses rather than response times. In the present article, we present two experiments that demonstrate the feasibility of collecting response latency data over the World-Wide Web using WebExp—a software package designed to run psychological experiments over the Internet. Experiment 1 uses WebExp to collect measurements for known time intervals (generated using keyboard repetition). The resulting measurements are found to be accurate across platforms and load conditions. In Experiment 2, we use WebExp to replicate a lab-based self-paced reading study from the psycholinguistic literature. The data of the Web-based replication correlate significantly with those of the original study and show the same main effects and interactions. We conclude that WebExp can be used to obtain reliable response time data, at least for the self-paced reading paradigm.     

Personality research on the Internet: A comparison of Web-based and traditional instruments in take-home and in-class settings

Students, faculty, and researchers have become increasingly comfortable with the Internet, and many of them are interestedin using the Web to collectdata. Few published studies have investigated the differences between Web-based data and data collected with more traditional methods. In order to investigate these potential differences, two important factors were crossed in this study: whether the data were collected on line or not and whether the data were collected in a group setting at a fixed time or individually at a time of the respondent’s choosing. The Visions of Morality scale (Shelton & McAdams, 1990) was used, and the participants were assigned to one of four conditions: in-class Web survey, in-class paper-and-pencil survey; take-home Web survey, and take-home paper-and-pencil survey. No significant differences in scores were found for any condition; however, response rates were affected by the type of survey administered, with the take-home Web-based instrument having the lowest response rate. Therefore, researchers need to be aware that different modes of administration may affect subject attrition and may, therefore, confound investigations of other independent variables.     

Scene context influences without scene gist: Eye movements guided by spatial associations in visual search

Although the use of semantic information about the world seems ubiquitous in every task we perform, it is not clear whether we rely on a scene’s semantic information to guide attention when searching for something in a specific scene context (e.g., keys in one’s living room). To address this question, we compared contribution of a scene’s semantic information (i.e., scene gist) versus learned spatial associations between objects and context. Using the flash-preview–moving-window paradigm Castelhano and Henderson (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 33:753–763, 2007), participants searched for target objects that were placed in either consistent or inconsistent locations and were semantically consistent or inconsistent with the scene gist. The results showed that learned spatial associations were used to guide search even in inconsistent contexts, providing evidence that scene context can affect search performance without consistent scene gist information. We discuss the results in terms of hierarchical organization of top-down influences of scene context.     

Reading the tea leaves in an intelligent Coffee Corner: Challenges for understanding behavior

This article discusses the challenges for methodological innovation on the basis of experiences in an experimental Living Lab setting: a context-aware Coffee Corner in a research institute. A context-aware infrastructure collects sensory information on users while they move and interact. People getting coffee can use a variety of services offered in the intelligent environment at the Coffee Corner’s site; for example, a colleague-radar application allows users to see the current positions of their colleagues in the building. At the same time, it identifies and authenticates users using proximity-aware and context-aware security features. Apart from proximity and context awareness, the analysis of contextual data allows the construction of a behavioral model of users that can be used to customize the services offered at the Coffee Corner. We explain how the Living Lab allows us to measure behavior in context in an unobtrusive and trustworthy way (e.g., by respecting a user’s right to privacy).     

Web U2: Emerging Online Communities and Gendered Intimacy in the Asia-Pacific region

Unquestionably, the zeitgeist of Web 2.0 is symbolized by the dominance of social networking sites (SNS) and user-created content (UCC). MySpace, Facebook, and Cyworld mini-hompy are but a few examples of SNS that are becoming increasingly part of urban everyday life and interwoven into the historicity of the Internet. Web 2.0 has promised much about new forms of participation, creation, collaboration, and authorship, and yet within each location, we can find examples of both empowerment and exploitation. This is particularly the case in the divergent region of the Asia-Pacific. Rather than the region being a sum of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983), this paper argues that the distributed social networks of Web 2.0 UCC is formed, informed, and maintained through the perpetual process of “imaging communities.” These imaging communities can be seen in the visual, textual, and aural modes of UCC and can be seen to reflect the region’s new technocultural cartographies.     

Shifting Loyalties: Reconsidering Psychology’s Subject Matter

Schwarz (IPBS: Integrative Psychology & Behavioral Science 43:3, 2009) cogently demonstrates that in conjunction with scientific conventionalism psychology has developed a rather deficient view of their subject matter: the human being. Psychology based on an impoverished notion of empirical has rendered subjectivity or ‘the measuring apparatus man’ invisible. As his story implicitly demonstrates, psychologists supported by a positivistic view of science (in part to be empirical) and notion of ‘objectivity’ have learned to trust their ‘rigorous’ methods instead of their participants as capable of revealing important and interesting phenomena. If we are going to take subjectivity and experience seriously there should be a cultivation of a new attitude or orientation regarding psychology’s subject matter (i.e., the human being) and science. This commentary discusses Mark Freeman’s (2007) argument that the first requirement of science should be ‘fidelity to the phenomena’ and elaborates on the implications for psychology grounded in this view of science.     

Contrast class cues and performance facilitation in a hypothesis-testing task: evidence for an iterative counterfactual model

Hypothesis-testing performance on Wason’s (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12:129–140, 1960) 2–4–6 task is typically poor, with only around 20% of participants announcing the to-be-discovered “ascending numbers” rule on their first attempt. Enhanced solution rates can, however, readily be observed with dual-goal (DG) task variants requiring the discovery of two complementary rules, one labeled “DAX” (the standard “ascending numbers” rule) and the other labeled “MED” (“any other number triples”). Two DG experiments are reported in which we manipulated the usefulness of a presented MED exemplar, where usefulness denotes cues that can establish a helpful “contrast class” that can stand in opposition to the presented 2–4–6 DAX exemplar. The usefulness of MED exemplars had a striking facilitatory effect on DAX rule discovery, which supports the importance of contrast-class information in hypothesis testing. A third experiment ruled out the possibility that the useful MED triple seeded the correct rule from the outset and obviated any need for hypothesis testing. We propose that an extension of Oaksford and Chater’s (European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 6:149–169, 1994) iterative counterfactual model can neatly capture the mechanisms by which DG facilitation arises.     

Social desirability, anonymity, and internet-based questionnaires

It has been argued that behavior on the Internet differs from similar behavior in the “real world” (Joinson, 1998a). In the present study, participants completed measures of self-consciousness, social anxiety, self-esteem, and social desirability, using either the World-Wide Web (WWW) or pen and paper, and were assigned to either an anonymous or a nonanonymous condition. It was found that people reported lower social anxiety and social desirability and higher self-esteem when they were anonymous than when they were nonanonymous. Furthermore, participants also reported lower social anxiety and social desirability when they were using the Internet than when they were using paper-based methods. Contrast analyses supported the prediction that participants using the WWW anonymously would show the lowest levels of social desirability, whereas participants answering with pen and paper nonanonymously would score highest on the same measure. Implications for the use of the Internet for the collection of psychological data are discussed.