Finishing Coding, Participating in Studies, and Exploring New Haven

Public writing wall at Arts & Ideas Festival

These couple of weeks have marked a lot of progress in my studies. I've officially finished coding all the past sessions for Katie's two studies! This means that now I just have to code any sessions that I ran in the lab and any sessions from upcoming festivals. While that may sound like a lot of work, it is definitely less than the 40 30-minute long videos I watched, re-watched, and coded. When I'm not coding, I'm running participants in the fairness and compensation study. The more participants we get, the more fun drawings I receive, like this one:

Drawn by a 12-year-old participant

Since this is an unpaid internship, we interns had to get creative with making pocket money, and we quickly discovered that most Yale psychology studies are compensated. So, naturally, we signed up for as many studies as possible. The majority focused on cognition, which made them very different from the ones I had experienced at Clark. While social psychology studies, in my experience, were usually a number of questionnaires, cognitive psychology studies were very hands-on; I looked at images, rated the causality of events, had my eye movement tracked, and so on. To my great disappointment, I was not able to go through an fMRI study due to having a metal wire on my teeth from having had braces. I noticed that when I first started out, I found it very hard to guess the research questions of the studies. But, as I participated in more and more studies, it became easier for me to understand the objectives of each task because I had become familiar with more cognitive psychology concepts.

Also this past week, New Haven's Art and Ideas Festival took place. There were daily concerts, seminars, and plays - unfortunately, I was working during a lot of them so I was only able to catch a few concerts. Even so, it was a great experience and it made me go out and explore New Haven with friends visiting from Worcester:

Juan re-enacting Jurassic World (Peabody Museum)

Stare-down with a prehistoric turtle (Peabody Museum)

Thinnest crust in New Haven (Modern Apizza)

Back in the lab, our lab meetings now follow a different structure - every week, a member of the lab presents their research, elaborating on the research questions and method and encouraging discussion. I find these meetings very useful since they establish a mock-conference setting; researchers discussed the smallest details of their projects with the audience, including a justification of their choices and defending potential methodological weaknesses.

Finally, professional development. In my opinion, the last two seminars have been the most productive. We were assigned "homework" each time; the first time we had to find PhD programs that fit our interests, and the second time we had to write a draft of our personal statement. It was difficult for me to do both of these, since at the time my interests were quite broad and undefined. However, after researching programs, I narrowed down my options and was able to put together a short draft detailing why I want to attend a specific program. For now, I am thinking about programs that combine psychology and education, though I'm not ruling out purely education-based programs.

On Thursday, we completed an entire month of the internship and, to celebrate, the lab went out for dinner. I couldn't understand how I had already finished half of the internship! I absolutely love the work I do in the lab and I look forward to going in for work every morning. Perhaps this is a hint that I will be happy working in research in the future :)

Coding, Grad School, and Running Participants

The past week has been incredibly busy!

Last Tuesday we had our first professional development seminar. This hour-long seminar, run by Dr. Laurie Santos and Dr. Yarrow Dunham, gives information about graduate school to summer interns. Last week, they covered whether a PhD is necessary for our employment goals. In short, we learned that unless a job specifically requires a PhD, if you want to a professor, or are extremely interested in psychology, you should not get a PhD. We also saw the pros and cons of becoming a grad student or a professor, and one point was the salary:

Academic salaries compared to football coaches' salaries. (PhD Comics)

I spent most of the week coding the videos of data collection that we recorded at Stratford. The legend on those was a little outdated, which made everything much more complicated to code. I also coded an old video of a compensation trial, both to train myself and for Katie to check the reliability between my own coding and the last person's. I was very excited to learn how to code, but I did not expect how long and tiring the process would be - I watched in full dozens of videos that were often very loud or difficult to hear.

On Thursday, we had our first lab meeting where us interns gave short presentations on the studies we are conducting. It went well and I liked learning more about the studies that the other interns were involved in. A lot of the interns are responsible for creating stimuli, either via Photoshop or Inquisit. Since my studies don't require stimuli creation, I thought I'd learn how to code on Inquisit when there was time so that I could explore another area of research.

My last PowerPoint slide - Skittle themed.

But what occupied me the most this week was preparing and running the compensation study. We have started calling participants from the database to set up appointments, and we finally got formal participants for our studies. Preparing involved separating Skittles by color, putting cards in the right order, checking the counterbalancing data-sheet, and emptying containers of any old Skittles. I spend about half an hour before every appointment preparing the materials - just as long as it takes to run the experiment!

The result of the skittle-separation ritual.

At the end of the week, I went back to Worcester to spend the weekend with some friends at Clark. Even though I have enjoyed my time at Yale so far, it was fun to spend some time in familiar places and with familiar people. Even so, I am looking forward to next week at the SCD lab - we have many participants scheduled!

Info-Dump Stage, Data Collection, and the First Week

The beautiful entrance to the SCD Lab.

Today marks a full week since I've started my internship at the SCD lab. The internship skipped orientation - we had received an intern guide weeks ago which we were expected to know by the time we got there. On the first day, we met our point-person (the lab member we were going to be reporting to), we practiced scheduling on the database, completed our IRB training, and we were given papers to study for the next day. I was assigned to a post-doc, Katie, who is studying fairness and punishment in children. The first day was by far the most difficult day at the SCD lab. It was tough to go through the info-dump stage, where we were asked to memorize a lot of information in a very short amount of time. Thankfully, the lab members realize that and help us out when we need it.

During these two months, I will be running one of Katie's studies and assisting her with another. The former examines whether children want to punish inequitable behavior or compensate the victim, while the latter studies whether group membership influences decisions about fairness in children. I am really excited to get more into these studies since I've never done anything similar before!

The rest of the week I had to memorize a 10-page script for the study I would be running, which turned out to be quite complicated. It involves an original apparatus that uses skittles to see if children are willing to pay a cost to prevent inequitable distribution of Skittles between two fictional children. This can be done in two ways: they can either pay to reject a distribution offer, thus punishing the child that made that offer, or they can pay to compensate the child who ends up with the fewer skittles, thus creating equity between the children. They also have the option of accepting the offer, which they can do without spending any of their resources. I will be posting more information on this as I study it some more and collect data.

Apparatus for inequity punishment/compensation study.

On Friday, I was able to do a pilot run of the study on two children. I was very nervous and unsure of my ability to follow the script verbatim, given its length. I made a lot of mistakes on the first trial, but I made few mistakes on the second. And best of all, at the end of the experiment, one child gave me a very sweet drawing that convinced me that I wanted to do research with children:

But the week didn't end there - I followed lab members on Saturday to the Stratford Main Street Festival in order to recruit participants and collect data for study. It was a great day! I didn't feel tired at all and we tested close to 20 participants. I was responsible for group assignments: we asked kids which color they liked better (yellow or blue), then assigned them to the yellow/blue teams, and then they moved on to the actual experiment.

The whole craziness of the lab made it difficult to run a house as well! I did not have time to go grocery shopping until Friday, and when I did, I went a little overboard...

Tons and tons of groceries!!!

Overall, this past week has been chaotic but very rewarding! I am excited for the coming week, especially since it might involve video data coding :)

Welcome!

The Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, where the SCD Lab is located.

Welcome to my blog! My name is Despoina and I am a rising junior at Clark University. This summer, I will be an intern research assistant at the Social Cognitive Development Lab at Yale University. The lab focuses on how children reason about social groups - more information can be found here. I will be updating this blog weekly or every two weeks about my experience at the SCD Lab!