I had never participated in a psychological study before Monday, Sept. 22. I signed up on SONA for the study "Approaches to Performance", conducted by Michael Wusik. The purpose of the experiment is to study the effects of music on spatial reasoning performance. Participants are randomly assigned to a group based on the level of distracting music ranging from 0 to 10, I was assigned to group number 8, extremely distracting.
I wasn't sure what I was gong to be doing when I got there, I thought it might involve doing some physical movement that required fine skills and then trying to do it with that annoying music. It turned out to be much cooler than that, it consisted of solving puzzles without sound and then trying to solve them with distracting sounds. The puzzles were 2d shapes that I had to trace without lifting the pencil or retracing the line. It was quite fun, I hadn't done a problem like that in years, and much less multiple of them. It was a challenge, but it's a very interesting puzzle to solve. At the end of the first set I was told what my spatial intelligence percentile is, so that was an interesting way of finding out.
Then came the most dazed I've ever been, sound that I can only describe as an alarm clock stuck on the most annoying tone. That went on for about 15 minutes, and even though I tried hard to concentrate, many times I lost my train of thought. My ears were ringing, and I felt like a thousand bees were flying in my brain. The sound waves seemed to aggregate in my brain and produce the sort of confusion one would feel with a firecracker exploding next to the ear. After the 15 minutes, the sound was turned off and I had to answer logical word problems. When I left the study I felt very groggy so it wasn't a very good idea to go to the study right before a test, but I don't think it affected my performance.
I'm glad I participated in the study, and it was a very fascinating experience, solving puzzles, and fighting against extreme distraction. I look forward to participating in more research studies and writing about my experiences.
I'm glad you decided to write this blog on your experience at a Sona study! It was different than an article review. Anyway, I haven't gone to an in person study before so it was interesting to hear your experience and what you went through to complete the study. It sounded like a very interesting study. I wonder what the implications of their study are though and what they might be trying to apply their findings to in the real world.
ReplyDeleteI've never done an in-person SONA study so it was very interesting to read about your experience! As for the study itself, I conducted a similar type of experiment in my IB psychology course in high school. Our experiment consisted of showing participants blurred out images of famous people (i.e. George Bush, etc). and played music from the Top 40 list on itunes. As the music continued, the images got clearer. We randomly assigned participants to group (one with music from the top 40 list, one with classical music and one with no music). We found that the group with the slowest recall of the celebrities was the group that listened to top 40 music, followed closely by the classical music group and as expected, the no music group had the best recall. I think studies like this are very interesting because I feel like there are so many mixed opinions on if you should study with music or not and this shows that any type of background noise will be distracting.
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