Horizontal - Vertical Illusion: An experiment
showing the effects of feedback on an illusion allows students to
answer interesting questions with their own data, and introduces them
to the excitement of running real experiments.
Guilt Detection: The student plays the role of a thief. Can a
word association task prove guilt? A terrific way to demonstrate the
importance of control procedures in an experiment that fascinates
students.
Shaping: Creating New Behavior: Can the student use shaping to
produce a rat with world-class strength? Appealing graphics
and four levels of difficulty make this game addicting.
Short-Term Memory: How long can a person remember a
trigram when rehearsal is prevented? The student's own data provides
a surprising and instructive answer.
Cognition in Recall: The student's own free-recall data
show clustering, intrusions, primacy, and recency effects, and
demonstrate that remembering involves cognitive factors.
Insight: Aha!: A word game seems pretty tough, until an
insightful solution (carefully built in to the program) shows that
insight often involves seeing familiar features in an unfamiliar
format.
Personality Evaluation: The student sees a strikingly accurate
personality description, purportedly based on responses to some
questions and performance on other programs -- and then
learns to beware of generalized personality descriptions used by
palm-readers and horoscope-writers.
Making Interpersonal Judgments: How are cultural stereotypes
maintained? A fascinating demonstration of how an experiment can
reveal subtle preconceptions.
Cooperation and Competition: An intriguing view of some
essential features of social interactions that suggests conditions
under which cooperation or exploitation may develop.
Segregation in a Campus Snackbar: Do strongly segregated
seating patterns imply strongly prejudiced individuals? The student
moves moderately prejudiced people around a snackbar until all are
satisfied with their neighbors -- and gets a
challenging look at an important social problem and how psychology
can examine it.
Neural Basis of a Visual Illusion: An advanced optional
program that allows students to simulate neural interactions, and to
see how these interactions can explain a visual illusion.
Developing a Psychological Test: A new disorder has appeared.
The student's task is to select questions and create a valid and
reliable diagnostic test. A great way to introduce the problems of
reliability, validity, false positives and negatives, and some of the
ethical issues in testing.
Scatterplots and Correlations: Graphics painlessly teach
correlation like no textbook ever could! Options for computing
correlations and displaying scatterplots from student-entered
data. Add, delete, or change data points on screen with instant
recalculation and replotting. Fascinating for instructors, too.
Progress Report. Automatically keeps track of the programs
completed by the student and provides a summary printout. Makes
assigning credit quick and easy.