As an unemployed, unoccupied person, I like to occasionally do something fun or interesting in between filling out applications forms and reading rejection letters. At the moment, my favourite thing to do is volunteering for psychology experiments, which fill the multiple purposes of filling up my time, earning me pocket change, and feeding my academic curiosity, which has been so sadly neglected since I finished my degree. I’ve always been fascinated by how the brain works (I’m carefully referring to the brain here and thus avoiding all kinds of philosophical hot topics such as dualism, functionalism and the identity theory), and while reading or watching talks online can be illuminating, being part of an experiment brings a whole new dimension to my interest.
Today I took part in an eye-tracking experiment, which involved me reading a sentence in which all but the word I was currently looking at was magnified. First of all, seeing words change size as you glance at them is very strange and distracting. As I read I was made aware of my own particular reading technique – I tend to skim sentences for meaning unless making an effort to concentrate on them, and found myself often having to go back to the beginning of the sentence having reached the end. I also had to look at a certain spot once I’d finished each sentence, and it made me aware of how quickly (yet ineffectively) my habits are formed.
The second thing which caught my interest while reading was trying to identify the purpose of the experiment – I often find myself trying to second-guess the goal of any given experiment, although my success is often entirely subjective. In this case, I decided it must have something to do with awareness – how we assimilate meaning, and how thoroughly we pay attention. But thinking about this, (as well as several random chains of thought inspired by individual words), made me quite pre-occupied, thus affecting my concentration and awareness of the task in hand. I’m never sure if this makes me a good subject or a terrible one.
At the end of the experiment I discovered the true purpose of the project was to develop on another discovery: apparently when we read a word, the speed at which we are able to identify and understand it depends upon how common the spelling is. For example: the word ‘cow’ begins with the letters ‘co-‘, which can be used to form many other words – ‘company’, ‘college’, ‘coerce’, ‘coat’, and so on. By comparison, the word ‘dwarf’ had the fairly unusual opening ‘dw’, and therefore as there are fewer possibilities as to which word it could be (‘dwindle’, dwell’ and that’s about it), it takes the brain less time to identify it. The study I was taking part in was attempting to see if making words and their openings more distinctive helped the brain to identify them more quickly – but knowing very little about psychology, I found it fascinating for what it revealed to me about my own habits, and the way my brain processes information.
In the past I’ve had brain scans and taken part in a study involving visual synchrony (based on, as far as I can tell, the premise that it is easier for native speakers of a language to identify whether someone’s speech coincides with the movements of their mouth). While sometimes the experiments themselves may be boring, I’m intrigued to see what they reveal about how my brain works – although of course, as a layman, all of my assumptions may be entirely false. Next stop, the medical labs to watch a dissection...
