Tutoring for Fun and Profit

Well do I remember my first tutorial – so many thoughts running through my veins and emotions knocking about my head (or some combination thereof). Primarily, I remember thinking: “I hope that I don’t vomit” and “Why, oh why, did I choose to wear a transparent yellow dress?”.

Now, with a bit of luck your first experience tutoring wasn’t, or will not be, like this. But first tute nerves, that rowdy student, and mental blanks are inevitable parts of tutoring. Fear not, however, gentle reader – it is my firm belief that tutoring can not only make you money but can also be enjoyable (or less unenjoyable)!

So first, let’s cover some ground. If you are thinking of going in to academia you should tutor. Tutoring is a stepping stone to lecturing – and yes, odds are that if you go on in a university YOU WILL be lecturing. Tutoring looks great on your CV (especially if you tutor across a variety of subjects) and gives you invaluable experience for the further teaching that WILL come (until, of course, you score that amazing fellowship that allows you to turn your back on eager young minds).

We are gearing towards the end of January now, and as such, you will be starting to think about what classes to nominate for tutoring, and I hope, reflecting on how you can get through the tutoring semester with the least pain.

So, do a little mental exercise with me if you will. Take yourself back to a tutorial when you were a wee little undergraduate student. There you are – sitting in the back, chewing on the end of your indelible ink pen, and thinking of England. What did you wish for in that tute? If you were anything like me, you were thinking “Please, please, please, please stop boring me”, followed by “I’m hungry”. As a tutor you may not be able to do anything about the second point, but as for the first, well there are a few simple things that you can do to make tutorials less boring for your students, and yes, for yourself!

Students, like animals, will respond to your mood. In short, if you are afraid, they will sense it. Tutors and lecturers who get positive TEVALs uniformly report that their most common positive comment from students regards their enthusiasm. Students want desperately to feel excited about their field of study – and as tutors you are often the only teachers who talk to them personally, and infect them with the psychology bug. Whatever you may be tutoring, think about what you love about psychology, and try to communicate it to the students. Maybe you are tutoring something that is traditionally dry (like stats), or in a course that you are not familiar with. But my money says that you can still find things there that will peak the students’ interest. For me, while teaching stats, I consistently think about the amazing findings that stats unearth. ANOVAs may be boring, but when I, the intrepid explorer, employ an ANOVA to unearth an amazing finding about human existence, suddenly ANOVAs are just that little bit more sexy.

Aside from enthusiasm, I always like to inject a little bit of unrelated fun in to my tutes (and now lectures). Add a picture or two to your slides, begin your tutes with music, and tell an amusing anecdote that relates to the content of the class that you are tutoring. You may feel like a complete dork in doing so, but odds are your students are dorky too, and will appreciate your effort. Students (like romantic partners) love to feel that you are going that extra mile for them.

So, to conclude – I hope that my little pep blog has inspired you to be the tutor that I (and Tony Robbins) know that you can be. I will now end with two of my favourite and most memorable tutoring moments:

1. 1. Leading my PSYC1030 students in an example relaxation exercises, one of my students got a little too comfy and let out the most gargantuan fart. The class erupted in giggles that quite literally lasted for 10 minutes.

and

2. 2. Feeling overtired, I wrote my meanest comment on a failing PSYC3020 essay that I ever wrote – I said “you and I both know that you can do better than this”. I felt terrible about it for ages – until, that is, I received this student’s second assignment in which they had taken the comment to heart, worked incredibly hard, and scored a 7!

Good luck guys, and happy tutoring!

Love, Fi Barlow

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What a day...

Today I have been through all the emotions: highs, lows, hunger, and fatigue. After conducting a year’s worth of research, I have spent the past few weeks writing a draft of a report to submit to a scientific journal. My co-authors and I met today to discuss my draft, but instead, I dropped a bombshell. I’ve been deliberating for about a week about what I was about to say, and just before the words leapt from my mouth, my heart first nearly leapt from my chest. I said, “We need to trash everything. We need to start all over again.”

It felt like the pain of having to say that to my colleagues was reflected by the looks on their faces in response. In retrospect, maybe I should have started the conversation with the justification for that statement, rather than hitting them first and then explaining why. So, let’s wind back and I’ll explain my thought process.

I’m determined to get published in a high impact scientific journal as soon as possible, and the research I’ve been working on could be the one that hits the mark. When writing the draft of the report, I had to get into the mindset of “this really is the best research ever”, to ensure that I conveyed the importance of our findings in the writing. And it worked - I drafted a very simple, convincing story based on a lot of previous literature, and I managed to emphasise the importance of what we were adding with our new experiments.

Unfortunately, regardless of any self-ego-boosting, I couldn’t convince myself that the way in which we conducted the experiment was optimal. In fact, some of our more interesting results were found by accident - after the first, main experiment, we realised that we lacked certain controls. We quickly designed a follow-up control experiment and collected some data. When we were looking at the new data, we realised that the control experiment didn’t really control for anything, but we found a new effect that hasn’t been reported by anyone else! Crazy!

But what would have happened if we included the controls from the beginning? Would the results be the same, or would they be completely boring? And this is the hurdle I just couldn’t climb over. If we did get this research published in a high-impact journal, other research groups would try to replicate our results, and if THEY employed controls from the beginning and didn’t find an effect, then we would be in a much worse-off place than when we started.

After a quick estimation, re-testing will take approximately 80 hours in total plus all the data analysis, and, after all that, the amazing effect we found might disappear. But now I have convinced myself this is completely necessary: I don’t want to be known for having reported something that doesn’t exist, and if the effect survives the re-testing, we know for sure we are onto something amazing.

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Dusting for Prints

In my PhD I work with police officers on the fingerprints they find at crime-scenes. But trust me, neither my work nor theirs is anything like CSI Miami. But occasionally exciting things do happen.

Last month I went to Queensland Police Headquarters and learnt to lift and photograph fingerprints. The officer teaching us probably thought it was mundane but Morgan and I were stoked. We used magnetic powder to dust Coke bottles, CDs and weapons. It was amazing seeing my own own fingerprints appear from nothing right in front of my eyes.  It's not too difficult but will take lots of practice to get right.



Like most PhD students I spend hours sitting in front of a computer reading basic psychology research and designing experiments. This makes it easy to lose site of the big picture. But times like the above give me some much needed motivation from the realisation that we researchers are working to solve problems that will affect people's lives, hopefully for the better ; )

Matthew B. Thompson

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Hard Work Has to Happen in the Learners' Minds

This week we were very fortunate to have renowned Harvard physicist, Professor Eric Mazur present three seminars at UQ. One hardcore academic lecture on optical physics (an area for which Eric is a world leader), and two seminars on teaching and lecturing style (another area for which Eric is a world leader). I decided to sidestep the optical physics lecture and attend the two teaching and lecturing seminars because effective communication of science is a skill I’ve recently become interested in.

Eric noticed that, while his students were passing his introductory physics course, most were only memorizing facts and not grasping the key ideas of his lectures. To show his students lacked conceptual understanding, he gave two forms of the same test, which were about content his students should have had a solid grasp; one test in traditional form that could be passed with rote learned knowledge, and the other test in conceptual form that required deeper understanding. What he found was that 40% of his students did really well on the traditional test, but tragically poor on the conceptual test. Only 10% of his students performed well on the conceptual test but, critically, they also performed really well on the traditional test.

Modestly, rather than assuming his students were stupid (a hard case to make about Harvard pre-Med students), Eric began looking at how he could change his teaching style to make it easier for his students to better understand those basic concepts. His eureka moment serendipitously occurred at a hastily-organised study session the panicked students requested after their dismal performance on the test they should have aced. Whilst trying to force the concept into his students’ brains with varying diagrams, some students who did understand the ideas were able to explain it to those who didn’t in terms they could appreciate.

The important discovery was that students who understand the content are also more likely to appreciate the barriers to understanding, having recently overcome them themselves. As an expert who had understood these ideas for more than 20 years, Prof. Mazur couldn’t remember what made them difficult to learn. He said “The longer you teach, the less qualified you become to teach.”

From this, Eric developed his Peer Instruction method, which can be seen here. The method has become hugely popular in the US, where it has been shown to improve learning over twice as much as traditional lecture styles. We are now starting to see similar changes in how UQ lecturers think about teaching.

You can watch Eric’s lecture “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer” here and look at his slides here


- Morgan

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Gamblin' man

It’s no secret to those who know me (and now you) that I enjoy gambling. Why so many of us engage in this insidious behaviour has been a focus of psychology research for many years. Personally I like to think that my tendency to gamble arises from an interest in and basic understanding of statistics. You only need to be vaguely familiar with the concept of gambling or perhaps have access to a dictionary to argue that I’m a fool. In my defence, I’m certainly not the type who strolls into a casino thinking I can win a fortune. Casinos and betting agencies employ statisticians far more competent than me to ensure that they win and I lose.

So when to apply the statistical knowledge endowed to me by psychology for my own personal gain? Fortunately people in general are far less adept at identifying true statistical patterns and reasoning out statistical problems than casinos. Last week I was in a bar with a friend who remarked “I’m not sure I know anyone who shares my birthday”, immediately I saw an opportunity to make some money. I bet them that there would be two individuals in the bar who shared a birthday. Was this a good bet?

My friend and I estimated there were at least 30 people in the bar, and being offered 2:1 odds that I was correct, I jumped at the bet. Did I make the correct decision? To answer this you need to know if the return on my bet is better than the odds of winning. That is, how many people are required in a group for there to be a greater than 50% chance that two of them share a birthday? If the number of people required exceeds 30 then I have made a bad bet.

The problem becomes easier to solve if you work out the probability that no one will share a birthday. In a group of two people the chance of no match is 364/365. Add a third person and the chance they match the first is 1/365 and the chance they match the second is also 1/365. Therefore the chance the third person does not match either the first or second is 363/365. To calculate the odds we multiply the fractions, 364/365 x 363/365, which gives a 99% chance that no one in a group of three shares a birthday or a 1% chance that they do.

As each person is added, the odds do not increase linearly, but rather they curve upwards rapidly. If you continue to apply this logic for a group of 4, 5, 6 and so on, up until a group of 23 people, you find that there is a 51% chance two people will share a birthday. It turns out in a group of 30 people there is a 70.1% chance that two people with share a birthday.

Without out the aid of formalised statistical methods it’s difficult in this case to arrive at the correct decision. This is why I enjoy statistics, they can often show the seemingly improbable to be quite the opposite. However, I didn’t actually compute these odds at the bar; I knew of them prior to the bet and thus was essentially hustling my good friend...



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2009 Wrap Up!

Last year we launched the UQ Psyc Blog, and before we get too far into 2010, I thought I’d write a quick summary of what’s happened on the blog so far. We started the blog with the goal to share what it’s like to be studying psychology at the beautiful University of Queensland, and hopefully to share some of the cool things we’ve been learning along the way. In this post, I’ll share some of the blog data we’ve recorded so far!

In the 6 weeks Matt, Morgan, James, Stef and I have been blogging, we’ve had 204 different people visit the blog over 600 times! While most of our visits have been from Brisbane, people have read our blog in Canada, the US, England, the Netherlands, and even New Caledonia.

James’ post Genuine Magic or Supernatural Powers had the most views (60 people), while my post Things About the Brain You Don’t Really Need to Know, had the second most, with 47. (However, people stayed on my story for 30 seconds longer than on James’ – not that I'm competitive or anything.)

Over 50% of people who visit the UQ Psyc Blog arrived at the site via Facebook, most likely after having clicked on one of our self-promotions that we each share on Facebook every time a new blog post is written. On average, each visitor stays for about one minute and thirty seconds, which should be just long enough to read a single blog post.

As for 2010, we plan to have many more contributors, and we’ll continue to strive to post stories that will be of interest to everyone, regardless of their backgrounds or interests. As always, feedback is welcome, and if you have any suggestions, comments, or want to contribute to the blog, please write to me at the email address below.

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Happy Christmas, Gifts, and the Gifted.

I was originally going to post some photos from a recent celebration the School of Psychology had, but I stumbled upon an article that I thought was far more interesting. Nature’s website reports that Kim Peek passed away yesterday, 23 December, 2009. Kim had some amazing abilities, like being able to read two pages of a book at once - the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye.

Not only could Kim read two pages at once, but he could do it in about 10 seconds, and could read even if the book was upside down. As if that’s not enough, Kim retained about 98% of the information he read, and could recall any bit of information from any of the 9000 books that he had ever read!

Brain scans performed in the 1980’s showed that Kim was missing a corpus collosum - the membrane that connects the two halves of the brain. (If you’re interested in pictures of the brain scan, check out this article.)

These skills didn’t necessarily make Kim’s life easier. In fact, Kim was quite disabled and, when he was only a few years old, his parents were encouraged (but didn’t) admit him to a mental hospital and forget he existed. His motor and social skills were poor, and his father had to care for him 24 hours a day.

In the movie Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman played a character based on Kim Peek. Not only did the writer win an Oscar for this movie which he later gave to Kim, but the movie seemed to help Kim’s social skills. Kim himself said that he couldn’t look people in the eye until he met Dustin Hoffman.

Below, I have embedded part one of a five part documentary on Kim Peek that I encourage everyone to watch. As inspiring as Kim’s abilities were, to me Kim’s father, Fran, is also hugely inspiring. Fran showed amazing patience with his son, and his love and care for Kim is obvious in the documentary.



At the risk of finishing on a sad note, Fran’s Christmas will likely be a lonely one this year. But thanks to Fran’s love and constant nurturing of his son, the world got to meet Kim Peek and witness some of the brain’s amazing abilities. Thank you Fran for sharing your and Kim’s lives with the world - it was truly a gift.

Regardless of whether or not you celebrate Christmas, everyone from the UQ Psyc Blog would like to wish our readers a fun, relaxing and safe break!

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What does it take to do a PhD?

Students often ask me whether I think they could do a PhD, or whether they should rather do a Masters, go clinical, etc… I got my PhD in Psychology two years ago, in Germany, and won a couple of dissertation prizes and so I guess you could say I was a successful PhD student. However, more importantly, I was a very happy PhD student. I didn’t do a Masters etc., but I can maybe tell you one or two things about the PhD. Obviously, what I’m going to say isn’t valid for every University, Department, or even every Psychologist at UQ, and your potential PhD experience will depend a great deal on your supervisor, but hopefully I can give you an impression of whether or not you would have a good time doing a PhD.

In general, I think, you’ll have a fantastic time as a PhD student if you’re cut out to be a researcher, that is, if you think, act and work like a researcher. What does it take to be a researcher? Here are some of my ideas – very subjective and idiosyncratic, obviously, but maybe it’ll help you.

First, researchers don’t have anybody who works out their schedule for the day, they have no direct supervision, no boss to tell them what to do. You, as a PhD student, will have your own project, and you’ll be ultimately responsible for the progress. There will be a million things you need to know (both knowing how and knowing that), but no one to teach you. Supervisors may be helpful or they may be a hindrance. You may have to seek advice from others, and teach yourself one or two things without anybody helping you. Do you believe that you can learn without a teacher? Or do you even like learning new things autonomously? That’s really essential. Another important factor is: Can you discipline yourself, and do the things that are necessary, instead of only the things you like best? That’s important for your progress.

Second, successful researchers usually come in two broad flavours: critical or creative. Have you ever been praised for your critical or creative thinking? Have you ever excelled in a course where this was demanded? If not, don’t despair. If yes, that’s a good indicator that you have what it takes to be a researcher (because our prime job is to extend the current knowledge pool).

Third, there’s a reason that the most successful researchers often seem to be absent-minded: They are really involved with their research, they think about their project all the time. They often put in more hours than just 7, 8 hours per day, and when they go home, they take their research with them. Are you capable of working 12-14 hours a day? Are you prepared to work on a weekend? Have you ever been really involved with a topic, up to the point of becoming real fanatic about it? That’s a great plus.

With motivation and discipline, you can obviously learn everything that’s required to do research. However, one important thing is writing skills: If you don’t have good writing skills, it’s going to be difficult for you. You may overcome these difficulties, but it probably won’t be much fun. So you may be off better choosing another good job instead of researcher/PhD student: No reason to make it harder for you, right?

Hope this helps!!! Cheers, Stefanie.
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Sense and Sensibility

I am very fortunate to share an office with an awesome group of guys. Our office is known as ‘The Cave’ for the simple reason it is located deep in the dingy basement of the psychology building, down the hall from where experimental ‘participants’ are kept. We all realise the importance of enjoying the environment you work in (even a psychology basement) and have created the concept of office ‘vibe’, which simply aims to increase the inhabitants’ satisfaction with their working environment. When you walk into The Cave you can tell the place has vibe. Office members should aim to uphold vibe and never quash it.

The Cave inherited an old whiteboard that was just taking up space. Clinton, senior Cave inhabitant, remembered what an old designer friend had done with their disused whiteboard, and so the Sensibility Graph was introduced. Sensibility is a measure of how sensible someone is, or of how much sense they are making. The graph is quite simple, each office member is represented by a different coloured line. Time, in days, is along the x-axis and sensibility is along the y-axis, so the higher on the graph someone

is, the more sensible they are.

The graph has been going for a couple weeks and up until this point it has just been a bit of a laugh; office members would decide whether someone was being sensible or not and arbitrarily decide by how much. But let’s get serious here, we are scientists after all! This measure of sensibility needs to go through the rigor of the scientific process!

A future project of our pre-pub Friday afternoon festivities (known as Crafternoon) will be to work on the Sensibility Graph and the measure of sensibility so that is scientifically sound. Perhaps the most exciting idea will be assigning values to the graph (why didn’t this occur to us earlier?) and statistically testing people’s sensibility. We could ask questions like:

• Are people more/less sensible on a Monday compared to other days?
• Is one person more/less sensible that others?
• Do large-scale meetings have a positive or negative effect on sensibility?

Updates to come :)

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Genuine magic, supernatural powers or something else??

Last semester I was given the exciting, albeit at times challenging, responsibility of tutoring statistics to a class of first year psychology students. While a large slice of the course, believe it or not, was dedicated to teaching various statistical techniques and their theoretical underpinnings a small and as I see invaluable component of the course was assigned to beating the scientific method into the students.

Having not studied first year stats myself in over four years and possessing only an average knowledge of statistics at best, teaching this class was a daunting task: thrust upon me was the responsibility of spiking the students’ interest in science and psychology and equipping them with the critical thinking skills necessary to battle the tidal wave of misinformation and pseudo-science that threatens to consume society.

A key principle taught to the students in this course is “Occam’s razor”. Occam’s razor simply means that the simplest explanation or strategy is more often than not the best one. This probably seems intuitive to a lot, if not most of you, but we humans appear to have an unprecedented tendency to construct wild and complex explanations to account for the simplest of phenomena. Are unexplained lights in the sky inhabitants of an extra-solar planet scanning our planet for intelligent life, as this "reputable" news source would suggest or is there a simpler, more plausible explanation? I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Below is a short video of what I think to be a cool “magic” trick. Any ideas on how they do it? There was no camera cutting or special effects. Stop for a second and ask yourself, is there a simpler explanation to the illusion other than “magical powers beyond the realm of reality”? If, like me, you prefer to apply logic and reason, resist the temptation to go here (scroll down for the answer of how this is done) until you have had a fair attempt at working it out yourself.



With great knowledge comes great responsibility (something like that) and I was determined not to fail in transforming my cohort of psychology students into agents of science. I can only hope that I succeeded to some extent, and my now ex-students are at this very moment employing their new found critical reasoning skills (aided by a healthy dose of scepticism) to make an impact as young scientists.



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The Devil's in the Detail

Just before Christmas in 1985 two teenagers, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, were smoking pot, drinking beer and listening to heavy metal music by Judas Priest. Raymond was first to rest the shotgun below his chin. He died instantly. James followed but survived with serious injuries.

What's this got to do with psychology you ask? According to Gary Greenwald, a christian fundamentalist preacher, backwards messages in rock music are satanic and can influence young people to a sinful life of sex and drugs. Judas Priest were subsequently sued for $6 million by the young men's parents for inserting the subliminal backwards message into the song that provoked the suicide attempt. Psychology proved them wrong.

On my recent trip to North America I visited the University of Lethbridge in Canada. I met a professor named John Vokey and spent some time working in his lab.

It was John who was asked to serve as an expert witness and to assist in the defence of Judas Priest. He conducted an experiment where he created a bunch of backwards messages, Psalm 23 from the bible for example, and asked people to identify the properties and the content of the messages.

He found no evidence that participants were influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by the semantic content of backward messages. His results suggest that the backwards messages people hear arise from active construction on their part.

In other words, people are very good at finding patterns in the noise of our environment so we hear and see things (faces, voices, etc.) that aren't really there. The effect is known as Pareidolia and is especially strong when someone tells you what to listen out for.

The case against Judas Priest was dismissed thanks, in part, to John (but Satan probably played some part too). See if you can pick John out from the heavy metal band in the picture below (click here to see the answer -- you may be surprised).

Matt Thompson
mbthompson.com




Judas Priest with Professor John Vokey


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Things about the brain you don’t really need to know....

Last night I hosted a trivia night at the annual Queensland Brain Institute Cognitive Neuroscience lab retreat at Stradbroke Island, and below are a few of the questions that I asked the 21 trivia players. Have a go at answering them! You can scroll down the bottom of the post to see the answers.

1. How much of your body’s energy does your brain use?
 
2. Awakenings is a film about Oliver Sacks and how he awakened about 20 patients from a catatonic state with a then experimental drug. Name the drug.
 
3. Which ex-Playboy playmate thinks that vaccinating children gives them autism?
 
4. What’s the name of the Hitchcock film that shares its title with a disorder that might arise from a problem with your semi-circular canal?
 
5. Which Hollywood star has publicly labeled psychiatry and psychology as a “pseudoscience”, because he “knows the history of psychiatry”? (The star uses the terms psychiatry and psychology interchangeably although they are quite different.)
 
6. Which internationally renowned UQ-based researcher might you find photographed with owls?
 
7. Apart from being a bad actress, what is Drew Barrymore’s affliction in the movie 50 First Dates?
 
8. True or False? A recent study found that, when lost, people really do walk in circles.
 
9. *Fight Club spoiler alert* In Fight Club, how does Edward Norton’s character cure himself of dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personality disorder)?
 
10. Which of the following researchers does not belong with the others: Freud; Skinner; James; Seligman; Milgram?

Don’t be disheartened if you found it difficult - I managed to stump even some senior researchers! Here are the answers:

1. 20% was the answer I accepted for trivia (but I can't find the source I used), although this site suggests it's more like only 10%!
2. L-Dopa
3. Jenny McCarthy
4. Vertigo
5. Tom Cruise
6. Professor Jack Pettigrew
7. Anterograde amnesia
8. True!
9. He shoots himself in the head (and survives!)
10. Milgram is the odd one out. According to a review in 2002, the first 4 authors are the most cited psychologists of all time. Milgram came in down the list at #45.

Of course, if you disagree with any of my answers or want to suggest your own for any reason, please leave comments using the comments option at the bottom of this post!
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Look again!

Over the past couple of weeks, Matt and Morgan have upped the anti with blog posts with pretty pictures. Matt shared some of his visit with a couple of stars of psychology, while Morgan gave us a nice summary of a well established illusion. So, now I have to try a bit harder. For this post, I want to show everyone one of my favourite visual illusions, and give you a quick run down on how it works.

I think the illusion, below, is the most compelling illusion ever, and you probably wouldn’t even believe what the illusion is without the additional pictures (I certainly wouldn’t). Seemingly, it’s just a swirl of pink, green and blue, right? WRONG! Actually, what seems like green and blue, are exactly the same colour!!!

Now, you probably don’t believe me, so in the version below, I edited in an aqua-coloured bar that is the same colour as both swirls and zoomed in.

So why does this happen? Why would our brain tell us so convincingly that two colours are different when they’re not? Have another close look at the purple and orange spirals that seem to run continuously around - the orange lines stop before the “blue” stripes, while the purple lines stop before the “green” looking stripes. Our brains like to fill in visual information, so at first glance we see the purple and orange loops as continuous. Then, without us realising, our brains contrast the darker colour of purple to the aqua, making it seem greener, and then contrast the the lighter colour of orange to the same aqua, making it seem darker. That is a simplified explanation, but, wow, what an illusion.

I saw this illusion posted in an online forum, one poster said in reply to the picture, "If we all get tricked by the illusion, then we are all seeing the same thing." This is an interesting sentiment - if everyone's brains process the image as being two different colours, does it matter that there is only one colour when we look at it closely? Maybe not, but it's still cool.

This illusion was created by an illusion legend, Akiyoshi. Be sure to check out all of his other very impressive colour illusions here: http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html - you might soon find out that your brain is tricking you more often than you realised!

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Ramblin' Man

It's said that one of the perks of academic life is travel. I can vouch for this. I'm a first-year PhD student but have already made two trips to the USA without spending a dime.

The purpose of this post is partly to gloat but mostly to convince you to take the opportunity to travel during your PhD and realise the value of getting your name and face out there on the international stage.

In October I was invited to speak at the University of California Irvine and the University of Lethbridge in Canada. (Securing funding is much easier if you can get someone to invite you!) I met Associate Professor Simon Cole, a big player in my research field of fingerprint identification. He gave me some tips on where to focus my research and his grad students showed me where they work and play.


Associate Professor Simon Cole and me

I was then treated to dinner by Professor Elizabeth Loftus. I'm sure you'll know her. She is best known for her pioneering work on the misinformation effect and the implications for eyewitness testimony. Loftus sits half way down a list of the 100 most influential researchers in psychology of the 20th century (just below Posner and Broadbent : ).


Professor Elizabeth Loftus, Me and her grad-student Shari Berkowitz

I also attended the Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in San Antonio, Texas. An intense week: 8 hours work, 9 hours play, rinse, repeat. The powers that be were impressed by our creation of the first HFES student chapter in the Southern Hemisphere -- HFES-UQ. Because Tobi, our wonderful president, couldn't make it (he made up some excuse) I was treated like an academic rock star by the organisers and fellow students.


Morgan, Dave and I receiving an award on behalf of HFES-UQ from Assistant Professor Sandra Garrett

Despite all this nerdy stuff, I still caught a Bruce Springsteen concert in New York with my dad, got drenched at Niagara Falls and cruised down the Las Vegas strip hanging out a limo sunroof drinking beer with my mate Morgan (not on tax-payer's dollars of course).


Morgan and I in a limo on the Las Vegas strip

So, get your academic persona out there and be sure to have some fun in the process!

Matthew B. Thompson
mbthompson.com

I thank HFES-UQ, NICTA and my advisors Dr Jason Tangen and Professor Penelope Sanderson who made this trip possible.


Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Psychology took me to Salt Lake City, and it followed me there.

One of the coolest things about choosing to study psychology is that it’s more than likely that you will see the phenomena your lecturers talk about actually happen in real life! After all, psychology is the study of human behaviour and cognition, so by definition you should experience your own and others’ behaviour and cognitions every day.

After taking a course in social psychology you’ll be acutely aware of group dynamics such as social loafing and conformity. It’s also easy to observe concepts from developmental psychology in real life, like the language development of little brothers and sisters, or nieces and nephews.

Not all areas of psychology, however, are as obvious in real life as the examples above. I am interested in concepts like perception and attention, which are often studied in highly-controlled experiments. Typically, these experiments involve a first-year student being roped into sitting in front of a computer for an hour to press buttons in response to stimuli. It’s not very likely that you will encounter this set-up in your day-to-day life, making it equally unlikely you’ll experience these perceptual phenomena outside of the lab or away from a computer.

For that reason, it’s very exciting to experience a visual phenomena usually restricted to computer monitors and dimly lit rooms, and even more exciting being able explain it with psychological theory! This is what happened to me on a recent conference trip to the States.

Being my first visit to the USA I managed to take a few weeks out from the conference to visit academic friends in various parts of the country, including a former lab colleague who now resides in Salt Lake City, Utah. We took a day out to hike up to beautiful Lake Blanche in the Wasatch National Forest.

This hike was always going to be a challenge for me. Having average (at best) fitness, and coming from Brisbane, which is warm, humid and close to sea level (the highest point in Brisbane is 287m above sea level - Mt Cootha). The hike we planned was a 6km trek (12km round trip) and included an 850m ascent to 2750m above sea level.

We took it easy and reached Lake Blanche after 3-4 hours of hiking, drinking litres of water on the way up. After having lunch and admiring the scenery I started to feel the effects of altitude sickness and/or dehydration (yes, dehydration, water vapour is lost from the lungs at a higher rate at these sorts of altitudes). This included light-headedness, nausea, and a headache.

Aware that light-headedness compromised my concentration, and that this may be dangerous for the descent, I tried to remain as focused as possible on the ground in front of me and where I needed to place my feet. This became fairly automatic after a while. With my eyes locked onto the obstacles moving towards me, I would go through the process of identifying potential hazards, placing my foot in a safe position, bending my knees to reduce impact damage, and then identifying the next hazard.

I kept this up for half an hour, eyes locked onto the pattern of rocks constantly moving towards me. It was then my hiking partner pointed out to the mountain running parallel to ours, exclaiming at how far we'd descended.

I peeled my eyes from the ground and redirected them towards the mountain in the distance. What I saw completely surprised and shocked me. The mountain was moving! To me it seemed like it was growing out of the ground and tapering off at the top. I decided this was a hallucination related to altitude sickness/intense dehydration.

It was as I was sitting down that I had my Eureka moment. The hallucination had really taken me by surprise, I didn’t think my condition was that bad. Then I remembered how I’d kept my eyes locked onto the ground for so long. The constant visual flow of the ground moving in one direction replicated part of an illusion known as the Waterfall Illusion. The Waterfall Illusion demonstrates a widely replicated perceptual phenomena known as a motion aftereffect, where, after viewing a constant moving stimulus, a stationary stimulus appears to move in the opposite direction to that which had been moving. For more information on motion aftereffects the wiki page is quite useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_aftereffect.

This is exactly what I think was happening with the mountain growing out of the ground. When my eyes were locked on the ground there was a constant moving stimulus coming towards me, or (as expected when looking directly down at the ground) moving from the top of my visual field to the bottom. When I looked at the stationary mountain it appeared to move in the opposite direction to the moving stimulus, that is, moving from the bottom of my visual field to the top.

How cool is that?!?

Thanks to our good friend Dave Liu for taking the photo!

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Working on Weekends: Effort vs Reward

I often come to uni on my weekends to get extra bits of work done. Sitting here in my office on weekends might be kinda sad from a social point of view. Maybe sadder still is that I actually enjoy being at uni at least 6 days a week.

I’m determined this weekend to finish revisions on a manuscript that my collaborators and I are re-submitting on Thursday. This morning when I arrived at my desk, however, I remembered the first year statistics assignments that I still have to mark. Like a lot of other postgrads, I subsidise my scholarship by tutoring statistics classes during semester, which is a heck of a lot of fun… until I have to mark all the assignments instead of working on my own research.

It’s a tough job to work out how to balance how much feedback to give the students versus how much time I spend per assignment. The first two assignments took me an hour each to mark, and now that I’ve gone through about 15, they’re taking me closer to half an hour each. (To put that into some perspective, I roughly get paid for fifteen minutes per assignment, which is extremely unrealistic.)

The amount of feedback I have been giving really comes down to how well the student has done. Really good assignments take very little time to mark, and require very little feedback on my part. Really bad assignments take very little time to mark - I don’t give them much feedback either. Instead, at the bottom of the marking page I write “Come and see me if you would like to discuss your mark”, knowing most students who get the really bad marks won’t read that far down the marking page, if they bother looking at it at all.

I tend to give the students who perform around the middle the most amount of feedback. My guess is a lot of these students have put in as much effort as the top-performing students, but struggle to understand the key concepts. I think these students need to have their errors made very obvious to them, but they also need to be encouraged to keep trying has hard as they did. After all, the research shows that we should reward effort rather than grades.

Unfortunately, when it comes to re-submitting our manuscript next week, the peer-review process cares less about the effort we put in, and more about the scientific clarity of the research as a whole. Worst-case scenario, if the manuscript gets rejected, I hope it’s at least in the mid-range so I’ll get lots of feedback!

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

A Ride Down Multisensory Integration Lane

This morning I experienced a variation of the ventriloquist effect which I’ll explain soon, but first, a bit of background to the story. I’ve started riding to UQ this year, and I’m so into riding now that I just bought a new, shiny road bike, and go for long rides around the Brisbane River before getting to uni. An advantage of my road bike is that the gears shift very smoothly and easily, which makes it easier to adjust my pedaling to go really fast, or to go up hills. Every time I press the gear levers with my hands, I feel the change of the bike chain move from one cog to another in my feet, which is usually accompanied by a metal “clicking” noise. So, every time I change gears, I feel something in my feet, I hear a “click”, and the feeling and the sound always happen at exactly the same time.

On my ride this morning I got to a part of the bike path next to a road works area and I needed to change gears. I pressed the gear levers with my hands and felt the familiar gear-changing feeling in my feet. Instead of hearing a subtle “clicking” noise, however, my changing gears seemed to make an extremely loud BANG noise that sounded like a blacksmith hammering an anvil. I panicked! Not only was this a brand new, expensive bike that I might have just broken, but also I couldn’t work out what on earth would have made my gears make such a loud noise. A few seconds after I inspected my chain, gears and pedals to find that everything seemed normal, I realized the experience was just an illusion! I had experienced a variation of the ventriloquist effect.

The ventriloquist effect occurs, for example, when you watch a ventriloquist perform live, and the actor’s voice really seems to be coming from the dummy’s mouth. If you’ve never seen a live ventriloquist performance (like most of the population), then think of every time you have been to the cinemas - the same ventriloquist effect happens: the voices coming out of the speakers around the cinema seem actually to be coming from the on-screen characters’ mouths, right?

The reality of the situation is that the location of the sound source, the cinema speaker for example, is far away from the location of the vision, the image of the person talking. Despite this physical separation of vision and sound, your brain assumes they are a single event because they are happening at exactly the same time and combines them. In the literature, this is referred to as multisensory integration (because information from multiple senses is being integrated, duh). And it makes perfect sense: if there is a flash of light and a crack of sound that occur at exactly the same time, it’s not unreasonable to infer the two are related. Multisensory integration can occur for different combinations of different senses, like vision and sound, vision and touch, and touch and sound, and usually makes it easier for us to perceive and respond to things around us. It’s important to know that the “more clear” sense tends to pull the perceived location of the “less clear” sense closer to it. So when we are at the cinema, the image is so big and clear, whereas we don’t know where the speakers are, so we experience the sound as being pulled towards the vision; we perceive vision and sound as one.

Back to my bike ride! What I finally worked out had happened was that a workman working next to the bike path had dropped a metal rod onto concrete. It was entirely coincidental that the sound of the rod hitting the ground occurred at exactly the same time I felt the gears changing in my feet. Because multisensory integration occurs automatically given the right conditions, my own brain tricked me into thinking the noise I heard came from the same thing that I felt in my feet! Because I didn’t know where the sound was coming from, but I knew exactly where my feet were, the sound got pulled towards the physical feeling. I experienced a ventriloquist effect of the tactile (touch) and auditory (sound) senses. An important distinction to point out is that my experience was “instant”, and made me perceive the noise and feeling as one thing, rather than being an afterthought where I cognitively decided that the two things were related.

When I worked out that I’d had a rather unique multisensory integration experience, I felt a nerdy buzz that allowed me to maintain a constant 30km/h speed on my bike for the rest of my trip! But this experience was especially cool for me because I’ve been working on several multisensory projects for almost two years now. Professor Penelope Sanderson, Matt Thompson and I are currently finishing revisions of a paper summarizing an experiment where people wore a mini computer monitor over one of their eyes while walking around, an experiment that I conducted for my honours thesis in 2008. We showed that multisensory integration of vision and sound seems to occur less when people are walking because of the flow of background visual information that happens when you move your head around. Over last Christmas, I was working with Dr Ada Kritikos on a project investigating the role of proprioception (the sense of where your limbs are in space) in the integration of touch and vision. The project with Ada has spawned a few different follow up experiments, so I can’t write about those paradigms explicitly. Suffice to say the experiments involve fake dummy hands and strangely shaped tools!