Psychology Experiment
cognitive psychology
"Catch THE vIRUS"
A game testing your concentration and memory
"Visual Illusions"
In daily life, you may experience struggling to figure out the hidden image from pictures. This is because your visual habits influence you! Due to the structure of images, the impact of light source or the effect of colors, visual illusions may occur. Visual illusion is an interesting focus that cognitive psychologists study on to explore what people experience and what parts of the brain are involved in perception. By watching the following video, you can experience different difficulty levels of illusions and discover that not everyone’s brain works in the same way on visual perception.
Reference:
Gregory, Richard (1991). Putting illusions in their place. Perception. 20 (1): 1–4.
"Inattentional blindness"
First, let’s watch a video to count how many passes of the ball the white team makes.
After watching the video, you must be curious of why. That’s because inattentional blindness occurs! Inattentional blindness usually happens when our attention has been engaged in another task and therefore fail to notice a fully-visible object or event.
Reference:
Simons, D. J. & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception. 28(9): 1059–1074.
Social psychology
"Conformity and Human Judgement "
Does truth belong to the majority of people? What will you do if you find most people around you having different ideas to the same questions? Sometimes, people will be conformed to the majority and influenced by the group judgement. Social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which group pressure could affect a person to conform. Watch the video to get more details, and you can find this social psychology experiment is well-designed and full of fun!
Reference:
Asch, S.E. (1951). Effects of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership and men(pp. 177–190). Pittsburgh, PA:Carnegie Press.
Developmental psychology
"The Marshmallow Experiment
and Self-Control"
Eat now or wait, how delayed gratification influences our future?
An instant satisfaction or a delayed but double gratification, which one do you prefer? The self-control ability to refuse the instant temptation is found to be one of the important factors to predict future success.
The Marshmallow Experiment was a study examining this idea. In this study, a child was offered a choice between 1) an immediate reward with only one piece of marshmallow (a smaller reward), or 2) two pieces of marshmallow (a bigger reward) if they could wait for 15 minutes. The child who could wait for the bigger reward was said to be able to delay their instant satisfaction. In the follow-up studies, the researchers found those children who were able to wait longer for the bigger rewards tended to have better life outcomes, such as educational attainment (as measured by SAT scores), body mass index (BMI), and other life measures. You can watch the following video to know more about this experiment.
Reference:
Mischel, W. & Ebbesen, E. B. (1970). Attention In Delay Of Gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 16 (2): 329–337.