You will be engaging in a signal detection experiment. The goal of this experiment is to gather data that will help us understand the our cognitive processes play a role even in the basic act of detecting if some stimulus, some object is in the world.
When you open up the experiment, you will start see these sliders centered near the top of the screen.
You will adjust only two of these sliders for the experiment:
Duration of Stimulus (msec): 16 and 100
Percentage of Trials with Signal: 10, 50 and 90.
So you will run the experiment 6 times, combining each duration with each percentage:
| Pct 10 | Pct 50 | Pct 90 | |
| Duration 16 msec | 16 msec, 10 | 16 msec, 50 | 16 msec , 90 |
| Duration 100 msec | 100 msec, 10 | 100 msec, 50 | 100 msec , 90 |
You will have 80 trials in each condition. Don't worry they go fast. A string of XXXXXXXX will be presented for the duration. You job is to determine if there is a Y in the list. use the buttons at the bottom of the screen to respond. You must guess yes or no that you say the Y. I don't know is not an option. The percentage tells you how likely a Y is present. So if you are not sure and there are Y's on 90% of the trials, what is your best guess? How about if there are Y's are only on 10% of the trials? Use that information.
After each run of the experiment, you will be shown the follwoing data table:
Record this data for each run (labeling the condition) in an excel sheet and send it in with the other data due this week.
Write-upAlso, as for all on a word page, write 2-3 sentects were you interpret what you think is going on in your data.
Here is the link to the experiment.