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.