Dear affiliate students,
Daniel has noted a misunderstanding with the online survey for seminar times.
We would like you to fill in all the times that you do not have classes scheduled. Looking over the responses so far, people appear to have said 'no' to times when they would just prefer not to have a class. For example, many people have blocked off the whole of Friday, but when Daniel checked their timetables he saw that they were free that day.
As you can appreciate, it is quite a logistical challenge to find times when everyone can meet, given that there are 50 of you taking classes from across UCL. Therefore, we must insist that you fill in this survey according to when you actually have classes scheduled. Also, as mentioned at the induction, things at UCL end just before the hour and start just after. So if you only have a class at 11-12 on one morning, this means that you would be free for a seminar at 10 and a seminar at 12.
Don't worry: once we have figured out a possible list of times to meet, then it is very, very unlikely that we would pick 9am on Monday or last thing on a Friday if we can possibly avoid it. We would like to avoid those times for seminars too!
Since the seminar classes won't start until the week of 10th Oct, we can give you until Wednesday of next week to fill in the survey. If you need to change your answers, I think doodle will let you edit or cancel your previous replies.
Yours,
Lucy, Matt & Daniel
Friday 30 September 2011
Tuesday 27 September 2011
Inputting class times onto doodle
Dear affiliate students,
Please coul you all make sure that you have registered you classes on the doodle poll by the end of the week, so that we can arrange seminar times.
You can find the poll at: http://www.doodle.com/x3g5ruhspsam3yh6
Yours,
Lucy & Matt
Wednesday 21 September 2011
Welcome to the UCL psychology affiliate program!
Dear affiliate students,
A very warm welcome to the UCL psychology affiliate program!
This blog is administrated by your affiliate demonstrators (Lucy and Matthias). Together with your affiliate tutor (Dr. Daniel Richardson), we use this platform to keep you informed. Please follow it regularly during your stay at UCL.
If you would like to contact us, you can write an email to Lucy (l.riglin@ucl.ac.uk) or to Matthias (matthias.gobel@etu.parisdescartes.fr).
We wish you interesting and challenging studies at UCL and an enjoyable stay in London!
Yours,
Lucy, Matt & Daniel
A very warm welcome to the UCL psychology affiliate program!
This blog is administrated by your affiliate demonstrators (Lucy and Matthias). Together with your affiliate tutor (Dr. Daniel Richardson), we use this platform to keep you informed. Please follow it regularly during your stay at UCL.
If you would like to contact us, you can write an email to Lucy (l.riglin@ucl.ac.uk) or to Matthias (matthias.gobel@etu.parisdescartes.fr).
We wish you interesting and challenging studies at UCL and an enjoyable stay in London!
Yours,
Lucy, Matt & Daniel
Research Projects for Psychology Affiliate Students: PSYC9001
Computational simulations of psycholinguistic experiments
Stefan Frank and Gabriella Vigliocco (s.frank@ucl.ac.uk)
In many experiments that study human sentence comprehension, reading times on words are measured. Although probabilistic models of language predict general patterns of word-reading times, it still unclear which particular psycholinguistic phenemona they are able to explain. In this project, the sentence stimuli from several psycholinguistic experiments will be processed by a number of models, in order to investigate which models can account for which experimental result. Advanced programming skills are not required, but the student on this project will need to have some affinity with programming and maths.
“Damned by Faint Praise” and “Praised by Faint Damning” (2 students)
Adam Harris (adam.harris@ucl.ac.uk)
“Damned by Faint Praise” is the phenomenon whereby weak positive information leads to a negative change in belief. Traditionally, Bayesian models of belief revision are unable to account for such effects because positive information should only exert a positive change on belief. Through a consideration of what information isn’t being provided, however, a version of Bayes’ Theorem incorporating a concept of epistemic closure can predict those conditions under which a ‘Damned by Faint Praise’ effect is observed. In some situations, the model makes unique predictions whereby an individual may also be ‘praised by faint damning’ – that is, a negative piece of information will have a positive effect. Two projects are available using experiments that are designed and ready to run, aside from question booklets being typed up and put together. Each project will require recruitment of 96 unique participants (participants will not be able to participate in both experiments). The experiments will have a similar structure to those in the paper below, which is available at: www.ucl.ac.uk/lagnado-lab/adamharris It is recommended that those interested in this project first read this paper.
Suggested Reading:
Harris, A., Corner, A., & Hahn, U. (2009). "Damned by faint praise": A Bayesian account. In N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 292-297). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Studies of Introspective Access to Reasoning
Petter Johansson and Dave Lagnado (petter@fennel.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
This research program involves giving participants reasoning tasks (for example the Wason card selection task, or SAT-style test questions) and then obtaining and analyzing reports on the reasoning process the participant used to get their answer. The verbal reports are recorded either with a microphone or by being written down, and can be coded according to several coding schemes. There is also the opportunity to construct a computer version of the experiment to be administered via a website, if a student is skilled with programming.
Does the relative frequency of a word's meaning affect how it is processed by the brain?
Jenni Rodd (j.rodd@ucl.ac.uk)
Many words in language are ambiguous and can refer to multiple concepts. For example the word "bark" can refer to the sound made by a dog and to the outer covering of a tree. To understand a sentence that contains an ambiguous word the listener must decide which meaning is appropriate on the basis of the meanings of the other words in the sentence. We have recently conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study which has revealed a network of brain regions that are more active when volunteers listen to sentences that contain ambiguous words. Previous behavioural experiments suggest that these sentences should be most difficult to understand when a very low frequency meaning is used, for example the "animal enclosure" meaning of the word "pen". The aim of this new experiment is to obtain accurate estimates of the relative frequencies of the meanings of the words used in our recent fMRI experiment using a variant of a well established word association method in which volunteers are asked to give a word associate for each of the ambiguous words. For example if given the word "bark" they might say either "dog" or "tree" and we can infer from their responses which meaning they retrieved. Once the student has obtained these measures of the relative frequencies of the word meanings, they will be given the opportunity to assist with the analysis of the existing fMRI data to see if there is a relationship between these measures and the brain's response to these words. These results will help constrain our model of how the brain processes spoken language.
Effect of Order of Different Focus of Attention on Choice Reaction Time Task
Mohsen Shafizadeh and Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (m.shafizadehkenari@ucl.ac.uk)
In the previous experiment about the effect of focus of attention on speed of decision-making we showed that external focus (focus on environment) speed up reaction time, but this effect depends on the body laterality so that the internal focus (focus on fingers) condition had better performance when the task required the S-R compatibility. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of focus of attention on speed of decision-making in a keyboard choice reaction time task when the order of stimulus cues is different. The design of experiment is between-within subject design in which two independent groups have to execute the task 200 trials in different conditions. One group (n=12-15) will receive stimulus cues about the finger (R/L) first and stimulus cues about the keys (B/W) second, whereas the other group (n=12-15) will receive stimulus cues about the keys (B/W) first and stimulus cues about the finger (R/L) later. Reaction time will be computed after each trial. Your duties are to find participants, to run the experiment on a standard desk computer and distributing the consent form.
Effect of Rhythmic Cues on Movement-Specific Self-efficacy
Mohsen Shafizadeh and Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (m.shafizadehkenari@ucl.ac.uk)
Self-efficacy is the belief to execute the specific movement that originates from different resources such as physical practice, imagery, modelling, self-talking, and feedback. According to scientific studies, providing auditory cues to performer could improve the movement coordination, performance, and self-confidence. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of auditory cues on motor control and task-specific self-efficacy in a stand-to-sit task in healthy people. The design of experiment is between-within subject design in which two independent groups have to execute the task 45 trials in different conditions. One group (n=12-15) will receive auditory cue by metronome, whereas the other group (n=12-15) will not. Self-efficacy will be completed after each 5-trial. Digital video camera and motion analysis software will analysis the movement to compute inter-joint coordination, movement hesitation, and velocity of movement. Your duties are to find participants, to collect the movement data by video recording and distributing the questionnaire and consent form according to instruction.
Effect of focus of attention online feedback on manual body awareness in healthy people
Mohsen Shafizadeh and Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (m.shafizadehkenari@ucl.ac.uk)
The aim of this study is to explore to what extent providing different online feedback from the position of hand as a kind of body awareness during the manual targeting task could be helpful for successful reaching. In this experiment two groups of healthy participants (n= 20-24) will be took part in a target reaching task in which they have to reach one hand to achieve a target that is placed in a 40 cm distance from the person. One group will receive the internal focus feedback about their hand position during the reaching task, whereas the other group will receive external focus feedback about the position of the target. All subjects are occluded and cannot use their vision and feedback will be provided by video cameras through projection of the motion and image on the screen. Dependent variables include targeting score (radial error) and hand motion kinematics (e.g. angle, velocity, acceleration).
Speech segmentation in noise: The role of stress and phonotactic cues
Katrin Skoruppa and Stuart Rosen (k.skoruppa@ucl.ac.uk)
This student project investigates what cues listeners can use to break down the speech stream into word units. We will test how normal-hearing adult listeners segment chunks of nonsense syllables (e.g. voolimay) that contain different combinations cues to word boundaries. Specifically, we are going investigate the interplay between stress cues and phonotactic cues in noisy conditions. As for stress cues, most English words tend to start with a strong syllable (e.g. WAter), and English listeners have been shown to assume a word boundary before strong syllables. However, competing phonotactic cues, such as the presence of a consonant combination that is rare within words, such as [kfl], can lead them to revise this strategy. Recent research has shown that such consonant cluster cues can outweigh stress cues in quiet, but listeners tend to rely more on stress cues in noisy condition (Mattys et al. 2005). The current project focusses on the interaction between stress and an acoustically more robust phonotactic cue, that is, vowel tenseness (tense vs. lax vowels, e.g. sheep vs. ship). We have already shown that this factor affects segmentation in quiet in a pilot experiment. The project student would use the same method to investigate speech segmentation in noisy conditions in 16-20 normal-hearing healthy adults. In the long term, we hope that this method can be used to test speech segmentation in patients with hearing impairment, who perceive speech as a degraded, "noisy" signal.
Suggested Reading:
Mattys, White & Melhorn (2005): Integration of Multiple Speech Segmentation Cues: A Hierarchical Framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 477–500.
The effect of social power across cultures (1 or 2 students)
Matthias Gobel and Ana Guinote (a.guinote@ucl.ac.uk)
The power one person has over another person is a ubiquitous part of social interactions. Social psychologists have been interested in the effects of power, and studies have shown that power leads to agency, selective information processing, and goal-directed behaviour, to mention a few examples. However, most of the studies have been conducted in Western countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom. One question that remains unanswered is if power has the same effects in different cultures. Indeed, culture provides a framework of shared meaning, values and social norms. Not surprisingly, important differences between individuals from North American or Western European countries and individuals from East Asian countries have been demonstrated with regard to how they feel, think, and behave. The question the present research project investigates is if the effect of power is the same or different across various cultures. To this aim, in our experiments, we compare British students with students from Asian cultures. The task of the interested affiliate student is to help with the organisation and preparation of one or more experiments, the data collection and analysis.
Suggested Reading:
Guinote, A. (2007). Behaviour variability and the Situated Focus Theory of Power. European Review of Social Psychology, 18, 256–295.
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition.
Psychological Review, 110, 265-284.
Please note:
This research project is for affiliate students that identify as Asian or Asian American only.
Behavioural coordination and virtual reality (2-3students)
Daniel Richardson (dcr@eyethink.org)
We will be investigating the consequences that different types of interpersonal coordination have for social interaction. The experiment will be run on pairs of participants who interact with each other in virtual environments. As they talk, we will manipulate the way their virtual selves appear to mimic each other and align their gaze, to see what effect this might have for how well they communicate and how they respond to each other. The project will take place in the 3D Cave environment in the computer science department.
Self reflection: gaze pattern and individual differences (2-3students)
Daniel Richardson (dcr@eyethink.org)
From late-august to late-September my lab (http://www.eyethink.org) will be running an experiment in the London Science Museum in collaboration with the lottolab (http://www.lottolab.org/). We will be presenting participants with images of faces of people who have visited the museum, including their own, and tracking their gaze while they make some judgements about emotions and attractiveness. At the end they will answer some biographical and personality questionnaires. Their gaze patterns to their own and others' faces will be related to various individual differences and personality.
Stefan Frank and Gabriella Vigliocco (s.frank@ucl.ac.uk)
In many experiments that study human sentence comprehension, reading times on words are measured. Although probabilistic models of language predict general patterns of word-reading times, it still unclear which particular psycholinguistic phenemona they are able to explain. In this project, the sentence stimuli from several psycholinguistic experiments will be processed by a number of models, in order to investigate which models can account for which experimental result. Advanced programming skills are not required, but the student on this project will need to have some affinity with programming and maths.
“Damned by Faint Praise” and “Praised by Faint Damning” (2 students)
Adam Harris (adam.harris@ucl.ac.uk)
“Damned by Faint Praise” is the phenomenon whereby weak positive information leads to a negative change in belief. Traditionally, Bayesian models of belief revision are unable to account for such effects because positive information should only exert a positive change on belief. Through a consideration of what information isn’t being provided, however, a version of Bayes’ Theorem incorporating a concept of epistemic closure can predict those conditions under which a ‘Damned by Faint Praise’ effect is observed. In some situations, the model makes unique predictions whereby an individual may also be ‘praised by faint damning’ – that is, a negative piece of information will have a positive effect. Two projects are available using experiments that are designed and ready to run, aside from question booklets being typed up and put together. Each project will require recruitment of 96 unique participants (participants will not be able to participate in both experiments). The experiments will have a similar structure to those in the paper below, which is available at: www.ucl.ac.uk/lagnado-lab/adamharris It is recommended that those interested in this project first read this paper.
Suggested Reading:
Harris, A., Corner, A., & Hahn, U. (2009). "Damned by faint praise": A Bayesian account. In N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 292-297). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Studies of Introspective Access to Reasoning
Petter Johansson and Dave Lagnado (petter@fennel.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
This research program involves giving participants reasoning tasks (for example the Wason card selection task, or SAT-style test questions) and then obtaining and analyzing reports on the reasoning process the participant used to get their answer. The verbal reports are recorded either with a microphone or by being written down, and can be coded according to several coding schemes. There is also the opportunity to construct a computer version of the experiment to be administered via a website, if a student is skilled with programming.
Does the relative frequency of a word's meaning affect how it is processed by the brain?
Jenni Rodd (j.rodd@ucl.ac.uk)
Many words in language are ambiguous and can refer to multiple concepts. For example the word "bark" can refer to the sound made by a dog and to the outer covering of a tree. To understand a sentence that contains an ambiguous word the listener must decide which meaning is appropriate on the basis of the meanings of the other words in the sentence. We have recently conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study which has revealed a network of brain regions that are more active when volunteers listen to sentences that contain ambiguous words. Previous behavioural experiments suggest that these sentences should be most difficult to understand when a very low frequency meaning is used, for example the "animal enclosure" meaning of the word "pen". The aim of this new experiment is to obtain accurate estimates of the relative frequencies of the meanings of the words used in our recent fMRI experiment using a variant of a well established word association method in which volunteers are asked to give a word associate for each of the ambiguous words. For example if given the word "bark" they might say either "dog" or "tree" and we can infer from their responses which meaning they retrieved. Once the student has obtained these measures of the relative frequencies of the word meanings, they will be given the opportunity to assist with the analysis of the existing fMRI data to see if there is a relationship between these measures and the brain's response to these words. These results will help constrain our model of how the brain processes spoken language.
Effect of Order of Different Focus of Attention on Choice Reaction Time Task
Mohsen Shafizadeh and Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (m.shafizadehkenari@ucl.ac.uk)
In the previous experiment about the effect of focus of attention on speed of decision-making we showed that external focus (focus on environment) speed up reaction time, but this effect depends on the body laterality so that the internal focus (focus on fingers) condition had better performance when the task required the S-R compatibility. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of focus of attention on speed of decision-making in a keyboard choice reaction time task when the order of stimulus cues is different. The design of experiment is between-within subject design in which two independent groups have to execute the task 200 trials in different conditions. One group (n=12-15) will receive stimulus cues about the finger (R/L) first and stimulus cues about the keys (B/W) second, whereas the other group (n=12-15) will receive stimulus cues about the keys (B/W) first and stimulus cues about the finger (R/L) later. Reaction time will be computed after each trial. Your duties are to find participants, to run the experiment on a standard desk computer and distributing the consent form.
Effect of Rhythmic Cues on Movement-Specific Self-efficacy
Mohsen Shafizadeh and Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (m.shafizadehkenari@ucl.ac.uk)
Self-efficacy is the belief to execute the specific movement that originates from different resources such as physical practice, imagery, modelling, self-talking, and feedback. According to scientific studies, providing auditory cues to performer could improve the movement coordination, performance, and self-confidence. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of auditory cues on motor control and task-specific self-efficacy in a stand-to-sit task in healthy people. The design of experiment is between-within subject design in which two independent groups have to execute the task 45 trials in different conditions. One group (n=12-15) will receive auditory cue by metronome, whereas the other group (n=12-15) will not. Self-efficacy will be completed after each 5-trial. Digital video camera and motion analysis software will analysis the movement to compute inter-joint coordination, movement hesitation, and velocity of movement. Your duties are to find participants, to collect the movement data by video recording and distributing the questionnaire and consent form according to instruction.
Effect of focus of attention online feedback on manual body awareness in healthy people
Mohsen Shafizadeh and Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (m.shafizadehkenari@ucl.ac.uk)
The aim of this study is to explore to what extent providing different online feedback from the position of hand as a kind of body awareness during the manual targeting task could be helpful for successful reaching. In this experiment two groups of healthy participants (n= 20-24) will be took part in a target reaching task in which they have to reach one hand to achieve a target that is placed in a 40 cm distance from the person. One group will receive the internal focus feedback about their hand position during the reaching task, whereas the other group will receive external focus feedback about the position of the target. All subjects are occluded and cannot use their vision and feedback will be provided by video cameras through projection of the motion and image on the screen. Dependent variables include targeting score (radial error) and hand motion kinematics (e.g. angle, velocity, acceleration).
Speech segmentation in noise: The role of stress and phonotactic cues
Katrin Skoruppa and Stuart Rosen (k.skoruppa@ucl.ac.uk)
This student project investigates what cues listeners can use to break down the speech stream into word units. We will test how normal-hearing adult listeners segment chunks of nonsense syllables (e.g. voolimay) that contain different combinations cues to word boundaries. Specifically, we are going investigate the interplay between stress cues and phonotactic cues in noisy conditions. As for stress cues, most English words tend to start with a strong syllable (e.g. WAter), and English listeners have been shown to assume a word boundary before strong syllables. However, competing phonotactic cues, such as the presence of a consonant combination that is rare within words, such as [kfl], can lead them to revise this strategy. Recent research has shown that such consonant cluster cues can outweigh stress cues in quiet, but listeners tend to rely more on stress cues in noisy condition (Mattys et al. 2005). The current project focusses on the interaction between stress and an acoustically more robust phonotactic cue, that is, vowel tenseness (tense vs. lax vowels, e.g. sheep vs. ship). We have already shown that this factor affects segmentation in quiet in a pilot experiment. The project student would use the same method to investigate speech segmentation in noisy conditions in 16-20 normal-hearing healthy adults. In the long term, we hope that this method can be used to test speech segmentation in patients with hearing impairment, who perceive speech as a degraded, "noisy" signal.
Suggested Reading:
Mattys, White & Melhorn (2005): Integration of Multiple Speech Segmentation Cues: A Hierarchical Framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 477–500.
The effect of social power across cultures (1 or 2 students)
Matthias Gobel and Ana Guinote (a.guinote@ucl.ac.uk)
The power one person has over another person is a ubiquitous part of social interactions. Social psychologists have been interested in the effects of power, and studies have shown that power leads to agency, selective information processing, and goal-directed behaviour, to mention a few examples. However, most of the studies have been conducted in Western countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom. One question that remains unanswered is if power has the same effects in different cultures. Indeed, culture provides a framework of shared meaning, values and social norms. Not surprisingly, important differences between individuals from North American or Western European countries and individuals from East Asian countries have been demonstrated with regard to how they feel, think, and behave. The question the present research project investigates is if the effect of power is the same or different across various cultures. To this aim, in our experiments, we compare British students with students from Asian cultures. The task of the interested affiliate student is to help with the organisation and preparation of one or more experiments, the data collection and analysis.
Suggested Reading:
Guinote, A. (2007). Behaviour variability and the Situated Focus Theory of Power. European Review of Social Psychology, 18, 256–295.
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition.
Psychological Review, 110, 265-284.
Please note:
This research project is for affiliate students that identify as Asian or Asian American only.
Behavioural coordination and virtual reality (2-3students)
Daniel Richardson (dcr@eyethink.org)
We will be investigating the consequences that different types of interpersonal coordination have for social interaction. The experiment will be run on pairs of participants who interact with each other in virtual environments. As they talk, we will manipulate the way their virtual selves appear to mimic each other and align their gaze, to see what effect this might have for how well they communicate and how they respond to each other. The project will take place in the 3D Cave environment in the computer science department.
Self reflection: gaze pattern and individual differences (2-3students)
Daniel Richardson (dcr@eyethink.org)
From late-august to late-September my lab (http://www.eyethink.org) will be running an experiment in the London Science Museum in collaboration with the lottolab (http://www.lottolab.org/). We will be presenting participants with images of faces of people who have visited the museum, including their own, and tracking their gaze while they make some judgements about emotions and attractiveness. At the end they will answer some biographical and personality questionnaires. Their gaze patterns to their own and others' faces will be related to various individual differences and personality.
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