BounceMainia E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N

Technologies Used: Adobe Flash, Biopac

This project involved testing smokers and non-smokers using a stress inducing task to determine whether there was a correlation between stress and wanting to smoke.

The stress task was agreed to be a game which involved moving a bouncing disc around levels, collecting green tokens with ever increasing difficulty. If the disc hit a red square then it would explode and the level would reset. The participant had 1 minute to get through as many levels as possible. The game was designed and coded by us, using the Adobe Suite (Flash for programming, Illustrator for graphics).

Whilst playing the game, participants were wired up to the Biopac system, which measured their GSR and pulse rate. These measures, along with the score of the player were used to determine the relative stress levels compared to their baseline reading. They were also asked to complete questionnaires asking them about their desire to smoke before and after the task.

3D Brain

Technologies Used: 3D Studio Max, Adobe Flash

Effective Learning. This student was looking at different methods of learning and which was more effective. They had a number of conditions which taught the participant about the different areas of the brain. There was a paper based text only condition, an audio and text only condition and a condition that involved a 3D animation of the brain along with text and audio.

The brain was created and rendered in 3D and then imported into Adobe Flash, where it was coded to be interactive, allowing the participant to click on the part of the brain they wanted to learn about. The brain came apart in order to help distinguish the different areas.

After participants had completed a distraction task they were asked to fill in a questionnaire based on what they had learned.

Virtual Reality and Pain Tolerance

Technologies Used: Oculus Rift, T150 Steering wheel and pedals, 5.1 Sourround Sound, Cold Pressor

For this experiment, the cold pressor was used to cause discomfort and then two different types of virtual reality where used to test participant's pain tolerance.

Participants were initially asked to put their hand in the cold pressor (set at 5°) for as long as they could whilst no stimuli was being presented. They were then given a recovery period for their hand to warm up again.

Next they were split into one of two conditions. One was a highly immersive VR experience using the Oculus Rift, a high end PC, full surround sound audio system, racing simulator ‘Live For Speed’ and a T150 racing steering wheel and foot pedals. The other condition used a mobile phone mounted in a cardboard VR headset, simple in-ear headphones and was controlled via head movement only.

They were again asked to put their hand in the cold pressor for as long as possible but this time they were presented with one of the VR experiences at the same time.

Spider Experiment

Technologies Used: 3DS MAX, Eyetracker

This student wanted participants to sit in front of the eyetracker and be presented with a live-stream video of a room where a spider would move across the breakfast bar on the side of the screen. This was not something which could be easily set-up, so we created and rendered a room and spider in a 3D software package. This gave us total control of the experiment and allowed it to be replicated identically for each participant.

The spider would appear and then run across the breakfast bar towards the camera. They wanted to know whether participants would be fixated on the spider even when it stopped, or whether they would check the room for other spiders. It was easy to quantify the data using the eyetracking software.

Simon Says

Technologies Used: Adobe Flash, Cold Pressor

This experiment studied the effect of discomfort on short-term memory.

One condition involved participants take part in an on screen ‘Simon Says’ game created by the psychology technicians, while their non-dominant hand was submerged in extremely cold water. The other condition involved participants doing the same task, without experiencing such discomfort. A 3rd and 4th condition involved a computer based maths test, which was also created by the technicians.

The point of the experiment was to ascertain whether pain/discomfort affected a person’s ability to remember the sequence set by the Simon Says memory game and to what degree.

BART, Go/NoGo Task

Technologies Used: Adobe Flash, SuperLab, Biopac

The Study is concerned with the effects of caffeine on high vs low impulsive individuals.

Participants were asked to take part in two tasks The BART (Balloon Analogue Risk Task) and the Go/NoGo Task. They then consumed significant amounts of caffeine, waited for 30 minutes for it to reach peak effect, then complete the two tasks again to record differences in results. The Biopac was used to record GSR and Pulse data.

The BART task was created by the technicians using Adobe Flash. The task involves participants pumping up a balloon, the more times you pump up the balloon the more cash you receive, however the balloon can pop, losing you the cash. The program outputted a text file with participant data regarding the average number of pumps on unexploded balloons, number of explosions, most pumps on a single balloon that was collected and the average number of pumps on all balloons (both exploded and unexploded).

The Go/NoGo task was created using Superlab. This simple task requires the participant to press a button on a response box as quickly as possible every time a stimulus is shown on screen unless it is a certain value, in which case you must not press anything.

Raven’s Matrices Testing

Technologies Used: Photoshop, EyeTracker

Reasoning and problem solving: A measure of fluid intelligence between genders from two academics schools using Raven’s Matrices Testing.

The student used the Eyetracker to present participants from two different academic schools with a number of the Raven’s Matrices Tests for them to solve, to analyse the difference in how they solve each puzzle.