Fall 1999 - Psych 3311 (Experimental Psychology) - Dr. Burton

Many of the class discussions will center around chapters in Gilovich, so please read this text promptly. Some of your homeworks will be to turn in a typed sheet with three questions you have about the assigned chapter. The questions should be of a challenging nature, such as objections you have to Gilovich's argument or new applications; they are not meant to be suggested essay questions; see the example on p. 4. Only students who have turned in their questions will be eligible to serve as spokesperson that morning.

Course Objectives: By the end of this class, the student should be able to:

The Experiment:

	Illusions				Short-term Memory
	Learning a concept or skill		Motor skill
	Eyewitness memory			Mental imagery
	Divided attention			Problem solving
	Gambling				Feedback
	Cooperation				Dominant hand-vs-Nondominant hand		
	Perceptual acuity			Mathematical ability			

1. Your first step is to decide on your teams and reserve your general topic for your experiment; do this by Class 3. Start now.

2. Second, you and your teammate(s) will find a "keystone" article in the library that represents the state of the art in that area. This article must be recent (no more than four years old) and in a peer-reviewed journal (not a magazine). It must describe at least one original experiment (not a review or essay). It cannot be from Perceptual & Motor Skills, Psychological Reports, or Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, which are not peer-reviewed journals. Each teammate must have his or her own photocopy of the entire article, which you must know thoroughly. On Class 6>, your team will give me a photocopy of the first page of this article, with a critique (details later).

3. Next, you and your teammates will thoroughly explore the literature on your chosen topic, using PsychLIT and the reference list and introduction of your own article. Your team must identify three articles per team member plus three more, including the keystone--for each, how did they vary the basic procedure in your keystone article? What did they find? Each teammate will read thoroughly and summarize three different articles from this list. You will turn in an annotated bibliography (including photocopies of the front pages of the ones read first-hand) based on this research by Class 10.

4. While you carry out this research, you will decide what sort of variation on this theme has not been tried yet, and why it might be interesting. Obviously, it must be a variation that you could achieve in our laboratory on relatively sophisticated human subjects. You and your team will then design in detail your variation of the experiment. It should be an experiment with a single true (not organismic) Independent Variable with two or three levels. You will submit a formal design proposal, in a format to be explained in depth later, on Class 14.

5. Before Class 24, you and your teammate will conduct a pilot experiment with me as the subject. All equipment, stimuli, data sheets, instruction sheets, etc., should be ready at this time.

6. Based on your design proposal and my comments on it, you will turn in (working individually) a justification for your experiment in the form of an APA-style Introduction section (a Reference List must also be included). You will use the keystone article and your three of the articles, and any others you are interested in, except for the articles that belong to your teammate. This will be turned in around Class 21.

7. Class 24 is Experiment Day. You and your team will carefully conduct twelve of your classmates through your experiment. You will take turns conducting the study and serving as your classmates' subjects. ATTENDANCE ON EXPERIMENT DAY IS MANDATORY.

8. You and your team will immediately organize the data and each turn in a graph of the means of your conditions for the next class. Every other assignment from this point on is to be done individually. For the class after that, you will turn in two versions of the analysis: One done by hand, showing all calculations, and one done in SYSTAT. Obviously, your results must agree.

9. On a date to be determined, you and your team will jointly present a brief (about 10 minutes) report to the class, focusing on the general idea of the experiment, your results, and your conclusions. They will have the opportunity to ask some questions about your experiment, and likewise you will be able to ask questions of them when they present. Attendance on this class is also mandatory.

10. Finally, in the week before the Final, you will turn in your own APA-format research report about your own experiment.

On p. 26, Gilovich gives examples (such as the so-called "Sports Illustrated Jinx") of situations where regression to the mean is misinterpreted. Since a medium performance is always most likely, a good performance is likely to be followed by medium performance (which will look like a decline) and a poor performance is also likely to be followed by medium performance (which will look like improvement). In my opinion, what his examples have in common is that people interpret these situations as involving motivation or morale rather than chance (e.g., once he or she is on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the athlete feels so much pressure that he or she becomes distracted.) My question is, does Gilovich feel that morale has no effect on behavior at all? What about overconfidence effects, for example? Are these also illusions?

SYLLABUS