Lab Session 1: Psychophysics

For this lab you will act as a test subject in a number of simple visual psychophysics experiments using several different experimental paradigms. These experiments run in your web browser.

Privacy note: You will be given the opportunity to download your results in CSV format. Your data is not otherwise stored or used in any way except for local presentation to you.

Experiments

Discussion Points

Here are some things to think about while doing each of the experiments, and also when looking at the data download afterwards. There will be opportunities during the session to discuss these and any other points that may occur to you.

What is the experiment attempting to measure, and is it successful in doing so?
What data is collected?
Is there any other data that you think would be helpful to collect?
What kinds of analyses might you perform with this data, and what would they reveal?
What is the experience of doing the experiment like? Did you learn anything from it?
Are there any obvious flaws in the experimental setups?
The experiments collect data from only a single subject — you. How might you combine the results for multiple subjects, and what effect would you expect that to have?

Visualisation

At the end of each experiment some extremely basic plotting is performed, but we strongly encourage you to try out other visualisations to get a feel for the data. You can use any environment with which you are familiar for this.

If you are not familiar with any data visualisation tools, we recommend installing R and running through some online tutorials, such as this one from W3 Schools. (If there is enough demand, we may demonstrate some simple R plotting in the lab session, but this will really only scratch the surface.)