Website for course "Experimental Psychology Lab", University of Osnabrück, 2018
A bunch of ideas for studies you might try to replicate.
When people hear about crime in a city described as a beast they tend to suggest counter-measurements based on aggressively fighting back the symptoms; if they hear it described as a disease they tend to rather suggest counter-measurements that would target the source of the problem. Thibodeau & Boroditsky’s paper has been influential and sparked controversy, including attempts to replicate the main findings.
| Authors | Paul H. Thibodeau & Lera Boroditsky |
| Title | Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning |
| Keywords | pragmatics, metaphors, reasoning |
| Challenge | create additional items |
| Difficulty | easy |
| Group | 1-2 |
Illusory conjunctions are quirks of our perceptual system. In the visual domain, when objects are presented only briefly and attention is directed elsewhere, we are prone to combine properties of different objects and perceive them as belonging to the same object. This project would replicate an influential experiment to demonstrate that visual illusory conjunctions can exist.
| Authors | Anne Treisman & Hilary Schmidt |
| Title | Illusory conjunctions in the perception of objects |
| Keywords | visual perception, attention, cognitive psychology |
| Challenge | create visual stimuli; flash stimuli for short interval only |
| Difficulty | moderate |
| Group | 2-4 |
When Jones says “Some of the phones are broken” Smith understands that Jones is in no position to have said “All of the phones are broken”. Either Jones knows that not all of them are broken, or she doesn’t know. Goodman & Stuhlmüller provide a model of reasoning about language use taking into account a speaker who might not know all the relevant facts. Try to replicate their study, and possibly even use their probabilistic model of language use to fit it to the data.
| Authors | Noah D. Goodman & Andreas Stuhlmüller |
| Title | Knowledge and Implicature: Modeling Lanuage Understanding as Social Cognition |
| Keywords | social reasoning, pragmatics, language |
| Challenge | record information about the likely speaker’s knowledge state |
| Difficulty | easy experiment; difficult modeling, if you choose to do it |
| Group | 2-4 |
Humans are faster at detecting a visual stimulus when it occurs on an object they were paying attention to. This is a classic study with plenty of opportunity to learn about proper stimulus timing and reaction time recording.
| Authors | Robert Egly, Jon Driver & Robert D. Rafal |
| Title | Shifting Visual Attention Between Objects and Locations: Evidence From Normal and Parietal Lesion Subjects |
| Keywords | visual attention, reaction times |
| Challenge | create stimuli, timing of presentation, record reaction times |
| Difficulty | difficult |
| Group | 2-4 |
There are two buttons. Each trial the participant clicks on one of them and either receives a reward or does not. The probability of receiving a reward is, in the simplest case, a different constant for each button. Rational choice theory predicts that participants should only ever press the button with higher probability of a reward. But they don’t! They tend to press buttons based on the probability with which they expect a reward.
| Authors | Nir Vulkan |
| Title | An economist’s perspective on probability matching |
| Keywords | decision making, probability, rationality |
| Challenge | decide reward scheme and procedure, possibly add clever modeling |
| Difficulty | easy (experiment); possibility to go deeper into modeling the data |
| Group | 2 |
A presupposition is a piece of information in a sentences which is communicated as true and crucial for the sentence to make sense. If Jones says: “The king of France is bald.” this sentences presupposes (at least) that there is a king of France. This paper investigates how people judge sentences where a crucial presupposition is false (so-called presupposition failure).
| Authors | Márta Abrusán & Kriszta Szendröi |
| Title | Experimenting with the king of France: Topics, verifiability and definite descriptions |
| Keywords | linguistic judgements, presuppositions, truth-values, philosophy of language |
| Challenge | compare 3-button judgements to 1-7 rating scale (if enough participants); extend to different presupposition triggers |
| Difficulty | easy (experiment); medium (material creation) |
| Group | 2-3 |