Education & Science Jonathan Oppelaar on 30 Jan 2008 11:37 am
Multimodal Binding Capacity in Working Memory
Today, Jan 29, 2008, I was a participant in a psychology experiment which is trying to understand working memory. The experiment consisted of me sitting in front of a computer screen with head phones while different images with sounds appeared. Then one of the images and sounds would appear again and my jobs determine if anything was different. I experiment consisted of about 10 different set ups. Each setup had different combinations of images and sounds ( i.e. color balls and a tones, color balls and animal noises, Grey balls and tones, pictures of familiar things with tones, etc.)
Below are some excerpts from the debeifing.
“Past work has shown that visual modality can quickly ‘bind’ or associate different features with 3-4 objects, giving us the ability to detect changes int those objects after a short delay( Vogel, Woodman, and Luck 2001).”
“Data from this experiment will indicated whether associating features from different modalities (such as color and sound) takes more effort than associating features within one modality (such as color and position). Also, following on earlier research by Ceci and collegeues (1994), we will asses whether more recognizable real world objects such as bugs behave differently in working memory than abstract ones such as domes.”
~Jon Oppelaar
on 31 Jan 2008 at 12:06 am 1.Andrew Kun said …
So how long did the experiment take to complete? Also, was it interesting or was it boring to go through it as a subject? (Alex and I found that some of our experiments were not riveting for subjects.)
on 31 Jan 2008 at 8:37 am 2.Jonathan Oppelaar said …
The experiment took about 45 minutes. It was interesting and surprisingly tough. I wouldn’t call it riveting. It felt like the more i got right the shorter the run was so, i kinda made it a game. Not sure if this is actually true though.