Psychology Study

Today I was a research subject in a psychology study called “Learning Probabilistic Sound-Object Associations.” After filling out a few forms, I sat in a small dark room receiving instructions from a speaker. In front of me there was a huge flat screen monitor, a wireless mouse, and a video camera. The experiment consisted of two parts. During the first part different objects appeared on the screen accompanied by a sound. The objects were all colored three dimensional shapes, and the sounds were just random noises. A new object appeared on the screen with a sound every five seconds. During the second part of the experiment two objects were displayed on the screen accompanied by one sound, and I had to choose which of the two objects best matched the sound. The entire process took less than one hour.