Social Neuroscience Experiment

Earlier this week, I participated in my first social psychology experiment.  Naturally, then, I wasn't quite sure what to expect.   

The experimental environment was far simpler than I had expected.  I sat by myself in a soundproof room (intriguing to me, since I'd never been in one), situated in front of a computer equipped with what seemed like a modified Playstation controller.  

The actual experimental task was much simpler than I expected as well.  My job was to fixate on a point in the center of the screen and identify a highlighted image that appeared in an array of blurred objects.  The highlighted image could be either a person, a house, or nothing at all.  The salient object would also be randomly highlighted at the corners by four colored squares (blue or green), with each color indicating a degree of reward associated with getting the image correct (green for high reward, blue for low reward).    

There was a catch, of course: the presented array lasted a very short amount of time, so discerning what object I had seen proved difficult at first.  But over the course of the experiment, I noticed that my accuracy and reaction time increased significantly compared to the first trial.  Moreover, I noticed interesting patterns in my selection behavior emerge: I was a lot faster and a lot more confident in selecting faces than anything else, and I was much more careful to be correct in selecting the green (high-reward) images.

I don't know if these responses were what they were expecting or actually examining; it's entirely possible they were examining something else about my behavior, but what it might be, I can only speculate.  Regardless, it was certainly an interesting experience.  And hey, I contributed to science!  That's pretty awesome in itself.