News:

NOTICE: Posting schedule is irregular. I hope to get back to a regular schedule as the day-job allows.


Friday, May 6, 2016

Survey help requested

http://teddysratlab.blogspot.com [Full link to blog for email clients.]



Dear Friends and Colleagues:

One of our laboratory projects is looking at brain signals that support memory.  We use a delayed memory task as our test, and in the task the subjects are asked to look at many different "clip-art" and photographic images, and then indicate which pictures they have previously seen in the course of testing. 

To better understand how the brain "encodes" such information, we categorize each picture according to a number of different features and characteristics - is it a cartoon? Photograph?  Silhouette or drawing?  Is it in color or black & white - if color, which colors?  Are there certain recognizable features or items visible in the picture? However, we are certain that different people will categorize the pictures in different ways.  Thus, before we can use these categories or classifications in a study, we need to conduct a survey of as many people as possible to find the most likely common classifications. 

Thanks to the Hampson Laboratory Webpage (http://hampsonlab.org), we have created a survey of 500 pictures that we use in our study.  We are asking volunteers to go to that page and take a survey in which we ask for classification of 25 images.  There are instructions and hints on the first page (http://hampsonlab.org/default.html); clicking on "Take the Survey" will bring up random set of 25 pictures.  You enter your responses by licking next to the appropriate features that you see in the image.  We know that the preselected research categories are not necessarily a perfect match to the contents of all pictures, but choose the closest match from the list of options.  At the end of the page, "Submit" the Survey, and your responses will be written to our server.  You can also click on "Take Another Survey" (and we hope you will!)  and the webpage will return to the beginning where you can click on "Take the Survey" to see a new page of 25 pictures.

The survey is completely anonymous - only the picture identification and 1's or 0's representing your choices are recorded (you can briefly see the data in the box on the Submit page).  Unlike an earlier version of the survey, there is no need for email or cutting and pasting the results; everything is automatic.  All of the pictures in the survey are purchased or used under fair use, non-commercial research purposes only.  Your data contains no personal information.  We conduct no diagnosis or analysis of the people taking the survey, and the data is used solely to develop anonymous population classifications that will be used for another study. 

We're hoping you take the survey more than once (i.e. more than one page of 25 pictures); we have 500 different pictures, and 20 different surveys.  You can choose your survey page by bypassing the default screen and editing the URL to read: http://hampsonlab.org/v2Survey1.html , ...v2Survey2.html, ...v2Survey3.html, etc. through  ...v2Survey20.html.  Again, all results are logged on our server automatically. 

Thank you for participating in the survey.  I appreciate your help. 

-Tedd Roberts / Rob Hampson