4: Interactions: Cognitive Experiments

Coglab is a suite of psychological experiments which you can do yourself. From any windows machine at CSE, go to the "Start" prompt, and click on "Run". Then type in this string: 
    \\172.27.20.23   (or run directly: \\172.27.20.23\CogLab\COGLAB.exe)
Please try to run it in CSE itself - the reason is that we need to have your output data for compiling the results...

The prompt will open on a remote machine . If you go to the CogLab directory, and run the "COGLAB" software, you will see a suite of 30+ experiments, all of which are quite interesting.

Please do a small trial run before your final run (this will familiarize you and help avoid errors). Then take a complete run. Only after a full run will it give you the analysis which you must "save" in both .html and .txt in the "Results" directory. Also, if you wish, you can link them from your own course webpage.

Modules: mandatory

  1. Mental Rotation: Given figures A and B, determine if B is just a rotated version of A, or is it reflected and rotated. (suggested time: 30 min)

  2. Sternberg search: evidence that searching in working memory (for strings or numbers) may be serial-like. Here is my run Note that the increment in the "presence" is about 40ms per item, despite a number of "outliers" in my responses (moral: pls don't do it without any practice!)

Modules: do at least one (can do more)

  1. Attentional Blink: You are looking for two letters in a stream of letters flashing by on the screen. The probability of finding both (when both are present) increases with the gap between them. Thus, attention needs a little interval (a blink) to refresh itself). (30 min)

  2. Brown-Peterson: Re-do a classic experiment on short term memory loss; how an unrelated action may interfere with memory. (20 min)

  3. Change detection : 15 min
  4. Blind spot: This will give you a map of your own blind spot. Make sure your head is in the same position w.r.t. the screen throughout this session (35 min).

    A quicker Blind Spot test: Close your right eye, and look at the red spot in the image below. As you move your head closer to the screen, at one point the blue line will seem continuous. Test the range of your blind spot by moving and angling your head!!
    Discussion (for class on Aug 10): Why does the blue line "join up"? Who fills it out when you can't "see" it?

  5. Visual Search: Searching for a green circle, among green squares and blue circles, takes longer than searching for a green circle among blue squares alone - this is because the former involves conjoining two features (20 min)

enjoy!