The Rat Pack

Handout for this activity

An explanation of this illusion on this blog

Our apparatus is shown below.

This design requires the use of a cut-up envelope. If you would like to use a variation of this design for your own perceptual experiment, I recommend that you create a similar apparatus, perhaps with an alternative version of the illusion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Possible Hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Since participants will perceive the line with V-shaped ends (Line B) as longer than the line with arrowheads (Line A), they will draw out the card depicting Line B to a length less than the length of Line A (10 cm).
 
Hypothesis 2: Since participants are aware of the potential illusory influence of the two lines, they will try to compensate for the power of the illusion and draw out Line B more, on average, with each succeeding trial.

To go further:

Alternative explanations of the illusion from VeryWellMind

Alternative explanations of the illusion and recent studies from The Illusions Index

Experience makes us more efficient and predictive perceivers. My husband, for instance, spends hours poring over maps; as a result, he can recognise several seas and countries by their contours alone. In my role as an English teacher, I have read so many student texts that I can identify misspelt words more swiftly than my husband, who as a Maths teacher has developed other (possibly more useful) perceptual abilities. In the same way, a person who takes an interest in a particular brand of clothing can recognise another person wearing that brand, even from a distance. These are all examples of how one’s emotions, motivation, training and experience can influence one’s perceptual set. Another term for this is perceptual expectancy.

Perceptual set refers to a readiness or a predisposition to perceive a visual stimulus in a particular way. Your background, knowledge, motivation and emotions all affect what you pay attention to, which features of a stimulus you focus on and, conversely, which details you ignore. You bring your own expectations to any perceptual task; the context in which you view the stimulus also plays a role. All of these factors allow you to formulate perceptual hypotheses more quickly and accurately, which influences your interpretation of the scene before you and generally enhances your perceptual skill.

For example, in the visual stimulus below, you presumably perceive a horse.

The following picture, however, provides more context. When you look at it, assuming that you have experience of chess and can therefore be influenced by the other figures surrounding the “horse”, you are likely to perceive a “knight”. In this case, both the context provided and your cultural and educational experience work together to influence your perception of the stimulus and your interpretation of its meaning.

Class presentation on this topic

Questions and Key Terms

a Write a definition of perceptual set. (See my presentation and your text.)
b List the factors that influence perceptual set and provide an example for two of these factors.
c Identify a perceptual set that influences your interpretation of a particular visual scene. Use key terms in your explanation of your perceptual set example.

Suggested key phrases for (c)
►I have a perceptual set as a result of my interest in…
►As a result of my prior experience and training, I…
►I tend to pay visual attention to…
►I focus on certain features of the visual sensory data, namely…
►I am able to formulate rapid and accurate perceptual hypotheses about…
►My motivation and my emotions also play a role, because they influence my attention to…

relative size, height in the visual field	light and shadow
linear perspective, texture gradient	linear perspective, texture gradient

♦ Handout: Depth principles – blank

♦ Handout: Depth principles – answers

♦ Interactive quiz: Cues to depth 

♦ Tiny Cards: Overview of sensation and perception

♦ Kahoot: Perceptual principles → With others | Alone

♦ Quiz: Categories and depth principles

---

To go further:

Article: Perception of depth from Webvision

Dear Year 11 students,

As you can appreciate, defining any set of complex human behaviours is a complicated operation. Since the topic of mental illness has often been plagued by entrenched prejudices and social stigmas, the labelling of a mental disorder is particularly open to dispute. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association has been revised and updated several times and is nevertheless open to development and improvement. In this task, you will have the opportunity to delve into the categories of mental illnesses as defined in the DSM and select a single disorder for closer study. I hope you find this challenging and worthwhile.

Kind regards,

Ms Green

Read

• PscyhCentral: Summaries of Mental Disorders based on the DSM IV/V 
• American Psychiatric Association: DSM Fact Sheets
• DSM Criteria: Gambling Disorder 
• MentalHelp.net: How anxiety disorders have been reclassified in the latest DSM version (DSM-V)
• Schizophrenia and Labelling 1: “My Name is not Schizophrenia” from Psychology Today
• Schizophrenia and Labelling 2: “Schizophrenia Term Use Invalid” from the BBC

Watch

• Ivan Pavlov and the Drooling Dog: Classical Conditioning and Anxiety Disorders 
• Ted Talk: The Voices in my Head 
• SciShow: The Chemistry of Addiction 
• ABC News: Online Gambling

Handouts and Activities

• Download Handout: Assignment on Mental Disorders
• Download Handout: The Two-Hit Hypothesis as an Explanation for the Development of Schizophrenia
• Kahoot: Mental Illness and Mental Health: Class Version | Preview Version
• Quiz: https://www.learnclick.com/quiz/show/28380

[embeddoc url=”https://psychologyrats.edublogs.org/files/2017/02/Power-Note-Taking-for-Year-11-Psychology-PDF-2017-1re5plv.pdf” height=”275px” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Online Activities

• Kahoot based on the presentation above: Preview Mode | Class Mode | Get a Kahoot Account
• Introductory Quiz
• Quiz on the Scientific Method | PDF of Quiz with Answers
• Quiz on the Nervous System | PDF of Quiz with Answers
• Essential Online Revision Page – Unit 1, 2017

Handy Downloads

• Handout: Hints, Layout and Language for Research Investigation Report
• Handout: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Dear Year 11 Psychology students,

Welcome to the new school year. Thank you for choosing the subject of Psychology, with its rewarding mixture of human stories and scientific research. 

The “Research Investigation” (Area of Study 3) is a challenging task. The main rule is: don’t panic. This assignment is all about learning and exploring the diverse field of psychology that you have chosen to study. Select a topic that you find interesting and then enjoy deepening your knowledge.

Most important of all, avoid stress by breaking the task into small, manageable parcels of work. Tackle your workload in do-able chunks; this approach will help you in other subjects as well. Following these instructions should help:

♦Chunk 1: Select a key study that interests you. See the long list of links below our instructions for ideas and starting points. There is also a “pinboard” that will allow you to visualise the range of possibilities. Feel free to search for and contemplate other options as well.

♦Chunk 2: Write an open research question that relates to your key study. Here are some examples of appropriate wording, in which we have employed phrasing that requires exploration of possibilities, rather than a closed, yes-no answer: 

• How does stress influence the ageing of the brain?
• To what extent and in what circumstances is multi-tasking possible?
• How does the use of marijuana affect the social and cognitive development of teenagers?
• In what ways (if any) does stress affect women differently from men?
• In what ways can biofeedback benefit people’s health?
• How does learning change the physical structure of the brain?

♦Chunk 3: Find another, related study on a similar topic. This will allow you to extend your writing and contemplate another perspective. If you are able to find two related studies, that would be ideal.

 

Finally, here is a handy plug-in and/or app that can be used on laptops, smartphones or tablets: Pocket allows you to save all the articles you find and so maintain an online digital logbook of your reading, accessible on all your devices: iOS | Android | Chrome | Safari. This could be useful in other subjects as well. 

Kind regards from Ms Green, Ms Corbo and Ms Bottrell

Useful websites for independent exploration:

◊Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation 

◊Forbes: Top 10 Psychology and Brain Science Studies of 2015 (see links to earlier years as well)

Links to specific subjects and studies:

BRAIN

• Article: How is the internet changing your brain? from Academic Earth
• Study: Chronic stress can damage brain structure and connectivity in Psychology Today
• Article with references: The ill-usion of multitasking from UCSD Centre for Mindfulness  
• Studies by Eric Kandel: Cell and Molecular Biological Studies of Memory Storage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
• Article: Neuroplasticity: Learning physically changes the brain from Edutopia

STRESS AND ANXIETY

• Study: Can stress age women to age more quickly than men? from the Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation
• Study: Real-time brain feedback can help people overcome anxiety from the Yale School of Medicine
• Study: Early-Life Stress Can Have Long-Lasting Impact on Brain Circuitry and Behaviour from Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation
• Study: Study explains how stress can boost the immune system from Stanford Medicine News Centre

SCREEN TIME

• Study: Gray matters: too much screen time damages the brain from Psychology Today 
• Article: Research links children’s problems to prolonged screen time from The Guardian

MENTAL ILLNESSES AND DISORDERS

• Article: My name is not Schizophrenia: removing the label from Psychology Today
• Longitudinal study: What can the Amish teach us about early onset Bipolar Disorder? from The Bipolar Child
• Study: Kids with ADHD must squirm to learn from Science Daily
• Study: Global study of mental illness from the NBC News
• Study: Connectivity problems may indicate which individuals are at greatest risk for schizophrenia from Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation
• Article: Study finds that the brains of autism sufferers fail to trim synapses as they develop, reported in New York Times
• Article: Computer modelling provides insight into cellular-level effects of schizophrenia risk genes from Medical Press

VIDEO GAMES

• Study: Violent video games provide quick stress relief, but at a price from Science Daily
• Study: Violent video games delay development of moral judgment in teens from Science Daily
• Study: Negative effects of violent video games may build over time, reported by Psych Central
• Study: Violent videos alter brain functioning in young men from Science Daily

ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOURS

• Article: Smoking marijuana does not lower IQ scores, but alcohol may, from Medical Daily
• Study: Twin study finds no evidence that marijuana lowers IQ from Science Mag
• Article: Can addictive behaviours be predicted in preschool? from Time

Click here to view the pinboard below on the whole screen
Psychology – Research Investigation

 

People in groups act in strange, counter-intuitive and sometimes disturbing ways. The reasons for this are complicated, to say the least. It appears that being in a group reduces one’s sense of responsibility and intensifies one’s inhibitions while simultaneously increasing one’s sense of anonymity. While these tendencies do not necessarily allow us to predict a single individual’s behaviour in a group, certain patterns of behaviour emerge when groups are studied as a whole. For instance, helping behaviour tends to be reduced as the size of a group increases. Bystanders are more likely to be helpful if there are fewer of them. This is known as the bystander effect.

Another example of the surprising effects of group membership is the tendency to conform, that is, to do what others do or say what others say, even when this goes against one’s own judgement; to ensure that one’s own attitudes, reactions and beliefs adhere to group norms. 

For instance, Asch (1951) illustrated through his supposed “line perception task” that about 33% of participants, after observing a number of confederates uniformly giving the wrong answer, conformed with the judgement of the majority. The mistake of the confederates was obvious, yet their unanimity moved the real participants in a substantial number of cases to conform, despite the evidence of their own eyes. Although this study’s findings are open to question for several reasons, conformity as a form of social influence is clearly an important topic of study in psychology.

How we perceive people in groups is also potentially problematic. While stereotyping people in groups can allow swift and even accurate judgements in social situations, it can also lead to prejudice if our stereotypes are too rigidly applied or overly simplistic. For instance, the stereotype of “doctor – white coat – expert” could be useful in determining which person to ask a question when you enter Casualty at a major hospital. On the other hand, if one persists in the belief that all people from a particular social group are snobbish or, worse, somehow inferior, it may become impossible to develop friendships, break down prejudice, engender understanding or accept diverse views. 

Watch

• Video: Rats and empathy – a study by Bartal, Decety and Mason, 2011
• Video: Prejudice and Discrimination from Crash Course Psychology Series
• Video: Social Influence from Crash Course Psychology Series

Read

• Asch (1951): Classic conformity study from SimplyPsychology.com – an excellent account that outlines the limitations of the study as well as its findings

Activities

• Kahoot: Social Psychology 1 – Play alone | Play with others 
• Kahoot: Social Cognition: Person Perception and Attribution – Play alone | Play with others 
• Kahoot: Attitudes and Research Methods – Play alone | Play with others
• Quizizz: Social influence – questions based on the Zimbardo, Milgram and Asch experiments 
• Quizizz: Research methods

Downloads

• PDF: Suggestions for Area of Study 3: Research Report
• PDF: Introduction to Prosocial Behaviour, Quick Quiz – Presentation 
• PDF: Stereotypes, Prejudice and Cognitive Interventions
• Hints for writing your introduction: Word | PDF 
• Hints for writing your discussion: PDF
• Note-taking: Person Perception and Attribution – Notes
• Research Methods: PDF
• Milgram: PDF
• Exam Revision – Dot Points: PDF 
• Research Methods – Revision Quiz: PDF 
• Practice Short-Answer Questions: PDF

[embeddoc url=”https://psychologyrats.edublogs.org/files/2016/08/Prosocial-behaviour-for-upload-1ztz6zy.pdf” height=”300px” download=”all” viewer=”google”]