If you'd rather not read detailed explanations about psychology experiments or hypotheses, move on. This post, she is not for you. I try to cover usual weird things soon. I now indulge in being a scientist. Hee.

"What my lab has been trying to reduplicate are results that deal with the degree of near-sightedness in myopic (i.e. near-sighted) people and their visual imagery abilities. Basically, we're wrapping up a study to see if there is a link between the two, to see if the amount of degradation in accuracy and speed in near-sighted people is majorly correlational with their degree of near-sightedness."

"If we prove there's a link, I'm going to do a developmental study on grade school and middle school kids. Basically, visual imagery develops at around 5-6. I'll find a population of kids that go vision correction then for their near-sightedness...then find another population that got it at around 10-11...these'll be the treatment kiddies...the control kiddies will be of the same age ranges, but with 20/20. I will then test all of these kiddies and see if my main hypothesis is true: degree of myopia influences the degree of mental imagery degradation in accuracy and speed...and if those kids who got eye correction at 10-11 do significantly worse than those kids that got it at 5-6."

"Then, you do the same thing with a high school population, seeing if the results go with the previous study."

"So you not only see if this cognitive degeneration exists, but if it is permenant or if, with extended practice, you can develop the skill to normal levels (if, say, near-sighted high school kids did as well as 20/20 kids, but the grade and middle school near-sighted kids did worse than 20/20 kids..it'd be because of a practice factor, not because of some permenant brain degeneration)."

"I'd go into more detail, but I've probably bored you to tears...so I'm going to make you cry a bit more."

"The next study is simple: I get a bunch of 20/20 college students over winter-term and get them to wear prescription glasses for the first week. I then make them perform a bunch of visual imagery tasks. Next week, they have no glasses and I test them. I switch back and forth 'til winter term ends. Since they will have had these glasses on, I could see if you can create a similar effect for near-sighted people in 20/20 people by changing the way they perceive their environment (i.e. through artificial refraction that'll be the equivalent of having them see like near-sighted people who only have a light prescription)."

"It'd be alot of work on the first study, but the second would be a fun breeze. And I could submit to the two different departments in which I major. IOW- I'm a precocious, though not petulant, young twit :)"

How many posts have I made today. Aw to hell with it.

previous - next