Rapid Reading now posted

I just posted a new experiment, done in collaboration with Tal Makovski, a post-doc fellow at our lab. We are very excited about this experiment, as it is the first of what we hope is a series that will really exploit the power of Web-based research. Please participate:

http://vacognition.wjh.harvard.edu/Bear


In other news, The Video Experiment chugs along, producing fascinating data. I wish I could talk about it, and hopefully I will be able to soon. Participation rates have really cooled for both that experiment and our original experiment (Time Course of Visual Short-Term Memory), so unless I figure out how to suddenly get more subjects, it may be a while yet. I am still waiting on two bloggers that had promised to write about the experiments, so hopefully that will help.

Some media attention

I guest-blogged for the New Scientist Magazine's Short Science blog. Read it here:

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2007/03/virtual-labs-is-there-wisdom-in-crowd.html

Because of this attention, I decided to add a new page on the website linking to articles about our lab. You can see it at:

http://vacognition.wjh.harvard.edu/media.html

New Experiment

Now that our server issues have been taken care of, we have a new experiment online: The Video Test. This is another 5 minute experiment. It involves watching a very entertaining short video and answering some questions.

http://vacognition.wjh.harvard.edu/STLT

Server issues

A cooling problem in our building (William James Hall) caused all the servers to be shut down. This means that our website (http://vacognition.wjh.harvard.edu) is not currently available. It also means that I can't access any of my files (I keep everything on the server), so I don't have a lot to do at the moment, except wait for subjects.

So far my first two subjects of the day no-showed. One thing I like about Web-based experiments: subjects never no-show.

Updates on subject recruitment

Subject recruitment was going fairly well for the first week -- about 20-25 subjects per day completed the experiment. The last few days has seen a precipitous drop. Yesterday, only 6 subjects participated. I have spent most of the day trying to advertise the website more, so hopefully that will improve.

First experiment

Our first experiment is now available. It has been up for about a week, and so far around 150 people have completed the experiment, which is fantastic. We are hoping to get at least 2,000, though, so we have a ways to go.

The experiment is called "Time Course in Visual Short Term Memory." To read more and for a chance to participate, click here. I can't write here what the experiment is about, because I don't want to potentially affect your results. But after you complete the experiment, there is a page that explains more about the study.

It takes about 5 minutes to complete.

Welcome

Welcome to the Visual Cognition Online Laboratory Blog. The Visual Cognition Online Laboratory is sponsered by the Visual Cognition Laboratory at Harvard University, better known as "Jianglab".

We will occasionally post updates here, but you should also check the Visual Cognition Online Laboratory website. You can also join our Google Groups email list. The emails on that list aren't shared with anybody, and we expect to only very rarely send emails, mostly to announce new experiments. You will need a Google email account. To visit the Google Groups page, click here.