Group 14 Dilallo, Bernard, West

3/10/15

Today we were assigned our project and we distributed a role to each group member. Our project will be a replication of the "Candle Problem" where we will test peoples' functional fixedness to see if it varies by age. Our current hypothesis is that as people age their functional fixedness will increase.

3/11/15

Today we gathered research on functional fixedness that we intend to use in our preliminary research essay. Each piece of research we have read so far has connected very well with our subject, some of which tested a similar hypothesis as us. At this point we are only setting up our paper's layout and reading up on other experiments.

3/12/15

Today we wrote up a thesis statement and a hypothesis. Our thesis/hypothesis is "The age of the participant directly correlates to their level of functional fixedness." We've only just begun writing the essay and it will likely take a few days to complete, so expect to see more updates as it is written.

3/16/15

I had originally planned to update the status of the essay day by day, but I became ill and wrote it all in one day. In the essay, we discussed how the research papers we read affected our views on the topic. We plan on using some methods of experimenting used in the papers we read. We will replicate methods, such as only timing till the subject uses the artifact in an atypical manner. Answering all questions in the same way for all participants, in order to reduce our impact on the tests.  Using these methods will  help give us more accurate results. The essay we wrote was to explain our methods and purpose for doing all the research. It was to give us a better understanding of a psychology experiment.

3/19/15

I was ill over the past few days and did not have the opportunity to update this blog very often. Over those days we got the layout for our project. We came up with how much space we will need as well as the materials we require. To make things easier we divided up the responsibility of gathering the supplies among the group. After we obtained the supplies we did a few preliminary test. The subjects we tested and responded well, so we expect good results during the actual trials.

3/25/15

We haven't done much over the past few days, but today we worked on our poster board. The poster we set up for the fair includes our hypothesis and some examples of other functional fixedness experiments. We also had a practice run today to ensure that our project would work fine at the fair. So far everything has gone well and we are looking forward to the fair. I will post video from the fair tomorrow, as well as a report on how well our project worked yesterday.

3/26/15

Today we had the Psychology Fair and it went very well. We had a great time testing peoples responses. During the course of the day we were able to gather large amounts of data and will be sifting through it over the next few days. You can expect to see some video from the fair uploaded in the near future, as well as a report on our findings.

Some stats from our day at the fair.

3/29/15

The Psychology Fair was a lot of fun, especially since we were able to try out some of our classmates experiments and they got to try out ours. It was also a lot of work and we were busy the whole day. We collected large amounts of data, but we haven't yet analyzed it. By far one of my favorite experiments at the fair was the maze. The people who worked on it did a good job making it, because it was really challenging. Overall Psych Fair was a lot of fun and very educational. Right now I am still analyzing the data, but it seems our hypothesis may have been wrong and that there is no correlation between age and functional fixedness. I'm only half way through the data, but I will give you a complete answer once everything is finished.

Here's some footage from our booth.