Getting Started

To begin this blog, I feel as if I should give you a better idea of what I'm going to be doing this month other than what I previously stated in my opening post, which doesn't provided you a big picture of what I will be exploring. So what's the deal with short term memory? We hear this term all the time, and I'll admit I throw it around many times in my every day language. But what is it really? Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. Over my Christmas vacation, I read some literature about working memory and cognition and how much information we can actually store at once for a period of time. Based on the articles, it became clear to me just how many conflicting ideas still exist in the realm of psychology and science as to defining what working memory means, how it works and how it differs between people. 

Hence the current study! My project is in conjunction with some continuing research my professor and advisor, Dr. Bopp, has been doing over the years comparing working memory functioning and processing between younger and older adults. This study uses a repetition-detection paradigm to help determine whether people are actually able to hold two different pieces (or “bins” in psychology lingo) of information in your memory at the same time without getting the information confused or without outside information interfering with the memory people are holding in their short term memory.

Today I essentially started at the beginning… sort of. Luckily, the entire repetition-detection paradigm and computer program was already created last summer by Dr. Bopp, so today was really all about getting things prepared to begin running subjects for the actual psychology experiment.  It sounds boring, but I spent all day revising verbal instructions that I will read out to subjects, consent forms and demographic forms. In addition, I had to go through some trials on the actual experiment to make sure that program was running correctly and the data that was automatically recording on the computer was recording the correct numbers. However, all of this is completely new to me! I’ve never really worked on any real research projects or done a big experiment so everything is so interesting and cool to me at this point, but stay updated to find out if I keep loving my research….

Until next time,

Reagan