I'm having one of those "better late than never" moments. I honestly did intend to write a review of Winter Quarter's classes right after the quarter ended. But I figure, just because seven weeks has gone by doesn't mean I can't post this after all, right? Right. So here goes ~

Web class was pretty fun. It was very small - only 5 students. The main thing I ended up learning was how to use Dreamweaver. Having only hand coded my pages up to that point, I felt like a big cheater using an application to do it for me. But, it worked out okay. Our assignment was to make a personal page about something we were interested in and to be creative with it. So, I made an animal page (shocking, I know), and added some little fun details in the pages just to make it entertaining. So, to see the page, click the link below, and feel free to click things, to try to move things, etc. It's interactive! Woo! Here's the page! In conclusion, class was fun, I got an A, and all is right with the world. Yay for web class!

Social Psych, as I've said before, was freaking amazing. I've decided I'm going to be extra geeky and create an entire page on Particlewoman of interesting stuff I've learned mostly in Social Psych. I'll probably include some stuff from my developmental psych classes, too. I'll let you know when it's up!

Last but not least, Research Methods, the class I spent the majority of my time agonizing over, turned out all right in the end. I got a B+ on my final paper for the quarter, and a solid B in the class. I was elated when I saw my final grade! The whole course, as I received low grades, I was told, "Yeah, well we really can't tell you how you're doing, because we wait until the very last moment to curve all the grades." So I basically thought I was failing all quarter long. And honestly, grade worries couple with the amount of work I personally put into the project (i.e., work I did all by my little self), it's no wonder I was so stressed out. Group work sucks sometimes. I'm glad I had the other two classes to enjoy and help keep me sane. Hanging out with my friends helped with that, too! I have cool friends.

Anyway, I never really wrote what my whole project was about in Research Methods, so here's the story...

The subject matter assigned to my group was Eyewitness Memory. We were given an experimental article, and we had to find two other articles, also related to the subject matter.

My group was assigned the subject of Eyewitness Memory, and we were given an article about an experiment that had been done regarding this subject. We then had to find two other experiments related to memory or eyewitness encounters, and create an experiment based off of that information. We also had to use the information in the articles to form hypotheses about what we might find.

The first article was about confidence and accuracy of eyewitnesses. Another article was about how misleading information could change someone's memory of the event that occurred. And the last article was about an experiment that had taken place at a mock-POW military training camp. In that experiment, trainees were interrogated by people who talked to them either harshly or calmly. And results showed that a very high number of the participants in the study could not correctly identify the harsh "attacker" from a photo array, even if the person had been yelling in their face for up to 30 minutes.

From these studies, we decided to incorporate a measure of memory accuracy, as well as misleading information, and an aggressive vs. a non-aggressive situation. The participants for our study had to be our other lab members. This meant that each of us in the lab participated in about six experiments, total. So, we had a very small number of people to work with - 15, to be exact. I originally wanted to be able to separate the group in half and give only half of them misleading information, and use the other group as a control. Unfortunately, the assignment was that we had to design a within-subjects experiment, which means that every single participant experiences every level of all the conditions. In other words, they all had to be given misleading information and experience the aggressive and non-aggressive situations.

Working within the limitations of time, space, etc., this is the experiment we designed:

People would view three videos (if you'd like to view the videos before reading the rest of the experiment, click here).

The videos were aggressive (a mugging), non-aggressive (people sitting on steps), and a distractor video. For the purposes of making sure the order of the videos didn't make a difference in peoples' memory of them, we had to be sure to counterbalance, a process that involved half the participants seeing the videos in one order, and the other half watching them in the opposite order.

The videos themselves were filmed by me with my digital camera. Then I put them online on two websites (according to the two different orders the groups would watch them in).

Participants were randomly assigned into the two groups and seated on opposite sides of a computer lab at school. After they watched each video, they answered a questionnaire in the packets we had put together for them.

Following the mugging video and the students-on-steps video, the questionnaires asked both misleading and neutral questions about the video itself. However, if someone answered questions about the video, then answered another set of questions about the video, by the third video, they'd know to pay close attention to the video for details. They'd get better as time went on, which is something called practice effects. This is bad, because then we can't tell whether someone's memory is better on the third video, or whether they've gotten better at the activity with practice. So, to avoid that, here's what we did...

The participants viewed Video 1, followed by questions about the video. Then they viewed Video 2 (the distractor video), followed by questions about their memory of events immediately prior to watching Video 1 (questions like, "Was there something written on the board when you walked in?"), and Video 3 was followed by questions only about the video. But by the time they got to the questionnaire, they weren't sure what we might ask about, so they were paying attention to the events in the room as well as the video. Lastly, we had to ask them if they'd ever been an eyewitness or if they knew any of the actors in the videos. One person actually said yes, and we had to throw out their results! And another person didn't watch all the videos because she hit the wrong button, so we ended up only using 13 peoples' results.

So, a few details about the misleading versus neutral questions... Neutral questions were ones like, "How many groups of students were on the steps?" Misleading questions were more like, "How many times did the attacker say 'shut up'?" That kind of question leads the participant to believe the attacker did say that, when in fact, she didn't. (Both of those are actual questions from the questionnaires.)

We had predicted that the non-aggressive (students on steps) video would be more memorable than the aggressive video. That was because the article had said traumatic events are harder to remember than neutral events. The problem with this is that when a person watches a video, they don't feel threatened, usually, so the rationale is gone. The aggressive video received far more correct answers than the non-aggressive. We had also hypothesized that misleading questions would throw off our participants and they'd get them wrong (again, based on previous findings). This, too, was not the case. The misleading questions were answered correctly more of the time. (Actually misleading questions had correct answers when the questions were about the non-aggressive video. When the questions were about the aggressive video, misleading information didn't seem to make a difference in whether the questions were answered correctly or not.) I think that might be because they just didn't know the answers to the neutral questions, and with the misleading questions, they might have recognized the incorrect information in the question itself and wrote the correct answer instead. By the way, these were fill in the blank questionnaires, not multiple choice or anything.

In conclusion, we got the opposite findings from what we had expected! It was pretty interesting.

Other interesting points:

- On the "How many times did the attacker say 'shut up'?" question, FIVE out of thirteen people answered more than zero. Five! That's almost half!

- One question was, "What's one identifiable feature of the attacker's face?" She was wearing glasses, which is what I thought people would answer. Many did. Many also mentioned thin nose, or black hair, or dark hair. I accepted those. Interestingly enough, one out of thirteen people said, "Dark skin." The attacker's skin color was almost as light as mine! And I'm pretty fair! I just found that fascinating that MOMENTS after watching the event occur, someone remembered the violent/aggressive person's skin color as dark. This tells me that they make that association in their head. The real life dangerous implication, of course, is that what if that person (or the many others out there just like him/her) do witness a crime? If the person is aggressive and scary, they might link that in their minds with dark skin. And if that's what they think they saw, they're going to pick a dark skinned person out of a lineup.

One thing I learned from this experiment, as well as articles on other experiments, and studies I learned about in social psychology class, is that eyewitness memory is ridiculously unreliable. It can help in some cases, but get this: 70,000 people a year are convicted based on eyewitness testimony ALONE. That means that while there are cases that include eyewitness memory in addition to other incriminating evidence, there are SEVENTY THOUSAND cases per YEAR in the U.S. that send people to prison based solely on what one person saw, which is known by judges and cops and other judicial officials to be notoriously unreliable. That's a lot of convictions! That is pretty scary.

Another eerie example... In my social psychology class, we were shown a picture of a convicted rapist while talking about sex crimes and convictions, etc. Moments later, my professor said, "Okay, now I'm going to ask you all to identify him. These should be PERFECT conditions - I showed you a ten foot tall view of his mugshot projected on the screen and left it up there for three minutes. Only two minutes have passed! In real life, you get a fleeting glance of someone while you're scared and are asked hours, days, sometimes years later to identify them. So, since these are the perfect conditions, let's take a vote!" (We had to laugh at how clever he was and how well he had sprung that on us - we were all surprised!)

He put six images up there, and we voted. It was nearly unanimous. We thought we had him.

The actual guy? His face wasn't even in the lineup. And 200 students were ready to say, "Yep, that's the guy."

That really freaks me out, I have to admit. How many of those 70,000 a year are completely innocent? I have to wonder.

Okay, getting down off the soapbox. Some final words on my study... It was pretty interesting, and if I hadn't had to do most of the work by myself, I might have enjoyed doing it all a bit more. Still, it turned out okay, and gave us very interesting results, and all in all, was a pretty cool experience.

[Note: If you're interested in reading the technical/science-talk version of the experiment, I'd be happy to share it with you (just drop me an email). And if you have any questions, let me know those, too, as I'm more than happy to geek out over my studies with you!]