Class Presentations for Sensation and Perception

Fall Term 2001

Stroop Effect.  Kim Ault, Sarah Davis, and Kate Thornton

Simultaneous Contrast: Sensory Phenomenon or Cognitively Influenced? Sarah Blythe, Heather Buford, and Jerry Johnson

Abstract

The current research studied the sensory and cognitive influences of the visual process of simultaneous contrast. The two variables were art experience and explanation of simultaneous contrast. The art experience condition was divided into artist or non-artist, and the explanation condition was divided into minimal or full explanation. Participants completed a luminance task and a color task in order to determine their performance with simultaneous contrast. The results determined a significant interaction in the luminance task, but no significant results were found in the color task. There does seem to be a cognitive component to simultaneous contrast, at least in decision-making and learning. Future research should include true artists, more participants, elimination of outliers, and a luminance task with less variance.

The Mozart Effect Revisited: An Attempt to Generalize to Color Perception.  Ashley Boester, Emily Helfrich, and Jessica Thornberry

Abstract

Previous research has established links between color and music, and between music and cognitive ability, as in the Mozart effect. This study attempted to link all three and show that classical music affects color-matching abilities. We hypothesized that the Mozart effect, which has been shown to improve performance on spatial-temporal tasks, will improve accuracy in color-matching tasks. We assigned participants to music and non-music conditions, and had them perform three color-matching tasks (Two Adjacent Test Fields, Two Adjacent Test Fields With a Gap, and Cross-Context Matching) in which they had to match one color to another using a CIE diagram. No significant results were found. However, in the With a Gap task, a pattern of means was found to be more accurate than the other tasks.

Gender Differences as a Function of Mental Rotation.  Tracy Krebs, Sarah Opichka, and Brandi Reynolds

Abstract

The gender difference between men and women in mental rotation/mirror imaging tasks is a highly studied phenomenon; but the factors that cause this difference are still unidentified. A sampling of 28 people (19 females and 9 males) ages 18-22 from a small liberal arts school in the mid-west took a mirror imaging test from the Purdue University Psychology website, which measured the reaction time and accuracy for two different tasks at various rotation angles. The two different tasks asked participants to identify whether an image was a mirror image or the same image of a standard stimulus. The overall reaction time showed a significant difference for men’s superior performance to women in both tasks, p < .10. The average reaction times at each rotation angle showed a trend towards identifying the mirror image stimuli as the more difficult task of the two presented, because of the slower reaction times displayed by both genders.