Have you taken Harvard's Visual Cognition Laboratory's online experiments?

See: http://www.neuralgourmet.com/2007/03/13/new_visual_cognition_experimen

Photo credit: Anson Vogt / phong.com.You might remember that I posted a few days ago about Harvard's Visual Cognition Laboratory's new online experiments. I just received an e-mail update from Joshua Hartshorne who lets us know that so far 384 people have participated in the VCL's first online experiment since it was first posted on Februrary 22nd. That's great! But VCL's goal for this experiment is 2,000 test subjects so they need your help in spreading the word.

If you have a blog, whether it's science related or you just think science is cool, then you can help VCL understand how our brain processes visual information by posting about VCL and linking to their experiments. Just be a mensch and don't give away the purpose of any experiments you've participated in or quote the debriefing information at the end of the experiments. Doing so could bias other people taking part in the experiments and it could literally trash the experiment itself making the work VCL is doing unpublishable.

In the meantime, there's a brand new experiment available. This one involves a quick test of your visual short-term memory, followed by a brief video and then another quick quiz. It's easy, it's fun and you'll be helping to advance cognitive psychology! Did I mention it'll only take 3-5 minutes of your time? Why wouldn't you want to participate?

tng's blog | 1 comment

Photo credit: Anson Vogt / phong.com.Harvard's Visual Cognition Laboratory wants you... as a guinea pig! Head on over and participate in their inaugural visual cognition experiment. The test is short and shouldn't take more than 10 minutes of your time. While online experiments are nothing new, research into visual cognition has previously thought to be untenable on the web:

Vision research tends to require very tight controls over the timing of the display, the size of the display, etc. New technology has made it increasingly reasonable to try doing vision research on the Internet. At the same time, care needs to be taken to pick experiments that can tolerate somewhat lax control over timing, etc.

I've signed up for e-mail notices from their Google Group so hopefully when the results are in I'll be able to tell you more about the experiment and what conclusions were drawn.

Hat tip: Omni Brain.

tng's blog