Other class materials Subscribing to the class Email ListServ
GRADES for 4th Period and 5th Period sections
An Introduction to the Course:
Required Texts and materials:
Ransdell, S. E., Marek, J. P., Lea, J., Kuntz, L.A., Flett, J., & Levy, C. M. (1999). Laboratory in cognition and perception: Student's manual (3rd edition). Gainesville, FL: Psychology Software.
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (4th edition).
Martin, D. W. Doing psychology experiments (5th edition, 2000). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
In addition, you must bring TWO new 3-1/2 inch HDSD disks by the end of the first week of class. Your data will be stored on these discs. Why two? Plan to leave one in the lab at all times. You can take the other one home or away to use on other computers on campus.
An Overview of the Laboratory:
This course is about how cognitive psychologists go about learning how the mind works. Because we know that this is not necessarily also your major interest, we've designed the course so that you will learn a host of general techniques and strategies for studying phenomena in psychology and for "doing science" in general. During the semester, you'll play several roles that include research participant, research assistant, and research designer. Most all of this work will be done on computers. This doesn't mean that you have to be a proficient computer user to get through this course successfully. We'll be teaching you everything you need to know.
You'll explore first-hand more than a dozen important paradigms and "hot topics" in contemporary psychology. You'll have opportunities to assemble, analyze and interpret findings from two of these so that you can communicate what you've learned orally and in writing. The oral presentations are designed to simulate the formal talks that scientists deliver at professional conferences and the talks they often give in symposia. There are two major written papers. The first is based on the same research that you discuss in your oral presentations. The second paper is based on an experiment that a team of students designs, administers, and analyzes. This second paper may be published on a WWW page for our undergraduate electronic journal so that the entire world can read it.
During this first half of the semester, we'll meet for presentations and discussions during class time on MWF. We've reserved a 4-hour block on Tuesdays in the Psychology Computer Lab for you to do the experiments and analyze your data. It is very important that you review the week's assignments for the lab before you come to lab.
You are encouraged to obtain a Gatorlink computer account, which provide you 15 free hours/month of dialup Internet service and unlimited email. You will need some way to access the internet and email. We will be sending you lots of email about your class assignments (for example, the grading keys that we will be using to evaluate your individual assignments), so it will be very beneficial to you to check your email frequently.
We will also establish a LISTSERV, a facility that enables us to broadcast questions raised by particular students to everyone else in the class at the same time. If you already subscribe to AOL, MSN, CompuServe or other commercial network provider, then you won't need a UF account, but you will need to provide us with your electronic address so that we know how to reach you electronically.
The first half of the semester is devoted to what might be called The Basics. We discuss many methodological issues, give you a review of the statistics that you'll need in this course, and study about a dozen different experimental situations in cognitive psychology. You will work as a research participant in each of these experiments, in the process learning about the logic underlying each area and, at the same time, providing data that one or two other students will use as if they designed the research themselves. This means, of course, that you (probably with a partner) will be also be responsible for one of these experiments. Your responsibilities include doing everything that is necessary to be able to understand the experiment (the research context, the methodology, and the data) in sufficient detail to be able to explain it to the rest of the class in the form of a 10-minute oral presentation. Your oral presentations will be scheduled about two weeks after the experiment is done in the lab, to give you plenty of time to do your work.
We will save data on our network server. At any time after the second lab class finishes its work on Tuesday, you are welcome to bring one of your floppy discs to the lab and make a backup copy of your data that you can begin to analyze in the lab or take elsewhere for this purpose.
Heads up! The time between when the class participates in "your" experiment and your presentation of the experiment to the class will be extremely labor-intensive, so make sure that you block off a significant amount of time during this period.
After you've had an opportunity to discuss your experiment with the class and to receive constructive feedback from them (and us), you'll be in a good position to develop your formal report of this research. By that time, you will have completed a number of small assignments that have given you an opportunity to practice developing the major constituents of an entire research paper.
The last half of the semester is devoted to Supervised Independent Research. This is the time that you get to practice everything that you've learned in this class and in EXP 3604. You get to exercise your creativity and stretch your curiosity about the phenomena you've learned about. How? First, you'll take another look at the paradigms that we've studied and reflect on the in-class discussions that we've had after each presentation. Then, you'll put together a plan (proposal) for conducting an experiment that extends this research in some way that you find interesting. After that, colleagues in your class who also want to study the same phenomenon as you will meet to share ideas so that you can combine your plans into an experiment that your team will undertake. We discuss the ethics of research using human subjects so that your team can prepare a protocol for the UF Institutional Review Board, which must approve all research involving humans before data collection can begin. We help you to recruit participants for your study from the General Psychology pool, but caution that it may be necessary for you also to seek volunteers from among your friends. Once data collection begins, we suspend class for a couple of weeks so that Dr. Fischler can devote at least one hour of class or lab time each week to meet with each team to discuss its progress, problems, data, and analyses, and to help put its findings in perspective.
On the last lab day of the semester, we hold our symposium at a to-be-announced
location. In this informal atmosphere, each team discusses what they've
accomplished and learned from their team effort.
These are the components of your grade:
Written assignments are due at the beginning of the class period. Each day or fraction of a day that a written assignment is late (unless there is a medical crisis) carries a 10-point penalty.
This course is extremely labor intensive for you and for us. We have done our best to minimize the effects of holidays on the timing of your assignments. We will do our best to provide you what you need to do your assignments during class and lab times. If you don't come to class or lab, you are going to get behind very quickly. More one unexcused (medically-related) absence will be considered unacceptable, and will influence our assessment of the 8% of the course grade allocated to overall participation.
One last thing: Please read the message about plagiarism. All of your written work will be your own. If you ever have any question about what is considered "legal" and what represents inappropriate use of the work by others, be sure to consult with Dr. Fischler or one of the teaching assistants.