Discovery Labs has been designed to improve your understanding of core topics in cognitive psychology. Each experiment begins with an introduction that connects it to a concrete example, the hands-on experiment or demonstration, your results, a debriefing of the lab results and then concludes with some questions for students to apply what they have learned.
In this activity we will explore top-down influences on colour perception.
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This Discovery Lab explores the limited nature of attention and the way in which we switch between tasks.
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The human visual system takes snapshots of the world every forty milliseconds or so. Our brain pieces together these snapshots in such a way that it feels like a fluid experience, even though it is not. Each time we get a new snapshot of the world, it masks the previous one. This phenomenon is well demonstrated by the flicker paradigm used in this experiment.
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The Ponzo Illusion shown in this experiment is a powerful demonstration of the influence of monocular cues on the perception of distance, and, in turn, on our judgement of the size of objects located within an apparently three-dimensional scene.
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This lab uses a paradigm that was developed by G. Reicher and D. Wheeler to study the word superiority effect.
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The Stroop task used in this experiment will effectively demonstrate automatic processing.
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In this Discovery Lab you will see for yourself how storing even a small amount of information in memory is difficult if we don’t get to rehearse it.
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In this Discovery Lab, you will see for yourself whether you will generate false memories.
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In this discovery lab, you will try the mental rotation paradigm.
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Psychologists have discovered a fairly consistent pattern with how people deal with risk. In this lab, let’s see how you deal with risky choices.
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In this lab, you will participate in a task that demonstrates differences in the speed of classifying words and non-words.
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In the perceptual refractory period (PRP) paradigm, participants are presented with two stimuli at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Sometimes one task is done right after the other, sometimes there is a delay. Response times (RTs) to the second task are then examined as a function of SOA.
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In this lab, we will explore the possible role of memory schemas in visual long-term memory.
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In this lab, we will be using the lexical decision task to look at the word frequency effect.
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This Discovery Lab examines how, through sufficient rehearsal, material in short-term memory becomes part of long-term memory.
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You should complete the Lexical Decision Discovery Lab before completing this lab.
In this lab, we will try a semantic priming experiment, in which the speed of recognizing words is compared in conditions where words are preceded by related words versus conditions where words are preceded by unrelated words.
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This Discovery Lab demonstrates how much information iconic memory can hold and how long that information is available.
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In this discovery lab, you will see the relationship between spatial location and response selection.
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In this discovery lab, we will look at your memory for a series of cued words.
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In this Discovery Lab, we will test your own short-term memory using the memory span paradigm.
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In this lab, we will be exploring the ‘visual search’ paradigm (e.g., Treisman and Gelade (1980)).
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In this experiment, you will gain experience with both exogenous and endogenous cue types.
In this discovery lab, we will attempt to demonstrate the von Restorff effect using your own data.
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Whenever any two tasks both require attention, you run the risk of encountering dual-task interference. It doesn’t matter if both tasks require quick responses, or even if both tasks require responses at all! What matters is whether or not the tasks both require attention.
To demonstrate this, you will now complete a dual-task experiment where the first task is an encoding task and the second task is a timed response to a tone.
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In this Discovery Lab you will explore how information is stored and retrieved from short-term memory.
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The present experiment is a popular paradigm used to show how human decision making can sometimes defy the laws of probability.
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In this experiment, we will generate an estimate of your operation span as you complete arithmetic problems while maintaining a list of words in short-term memory.
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This Discovery Lab will explore synaptic transmission, they process by which neurons communicate across synapses.
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This lab explores an issue important to psycholinguistics. More details will be provided when you have finished the experiment.
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This discovery lab explores the influence of explicit and implicit processing on judgment and decision making.
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Please note: This activity may not be fully accessible, but alternative accessible content is available.
Please note: This activity may not be fully accessible, but alternative accessible content is available.
This discovery lab explores confirmation bias; that people tend to look for information that confirms a rule even when their job is to find out if a rule isn’t being followed.
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