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 :)