Psychology ERA help needed, I'm strugglin!

[lolbox]

Theres an ERA SAC coming up and I'm really battling with some parts, I thought I'd ask you guys since you havn't let me down yet lol.
My teacher just gave us a ticksheet as to what he is marking us on in the ERA, he didn't explain any of the parts.

The topic is: The effect of past experience on the interpretation of an ambiguous stimulus

Firstly, what exactly are you meant to write in an Abstract? I have no clue at the moment.

Next some areas in the introduction I'm a bit confused about are as follows
- The importance of studying visual perception and the perceptual set (worth 2 marks) - what exactly are we supposed to write for this?

- Explanation of the interactive nature of the visual perception system (is this just visual sensation and perception and the process)

and the main one:
- Explanation of how perceptual set both facilitates perception and leads to perceptual errors (4 marks) - I have no idea what this is about but it is worth a massive 4 marks so any help would be appreciated. I don't understand it at all.


and Finally critisicms of the experimental design and ways of improving it. I can't come up with any. We just interviewed a bunch of kids, showed them flashcards with animals then either a rat or a man and they told us what they thought it was. Results wise it was successful and supported the experiment therefore what critisicms could you have?

Thanks for all the help

[Eriny]

In the 'notes' section I have an example ERA, which should help. There should also be a section in your book explaining what you need to do for each section.

Basically, an abstract is a summary of the whole study, including a hypothesis, aim, a bit on method, etc. and your main findings.

"The importance of studying visual perception and the perceptual set"
In psych, it's really important to 'justify' your research and your use of participants - why is this worth studying? That's what this question is asking you to address. Why would you study visual perception? What is the practical applications of doing so? You may also like to explain ideological reasons for doing so as well - it means you can understand the human brain and human nature a little better.

It's important for you to think about this question for yourself, as it will inform what's motivating you to do this course in the first place. Why is this stuff important?

"Explanation of the interactive nature of the visual perception system"
Yes, this is what you thought it is. You might want to do this at the deepest level possible, so, explaining what physical parts of the eye is involved in each process, and explaining what visual sensation is compared to perception.

"Explanation of how perceptual set both facilitates perception and leads to perceptual errors"
So, do you know what the perceptual set is? It's basically about what we expect to perceive, rather than what is out there. So, for instance, if someone showed me this picture http://www.opticaloctopus.com/commentarypics/1.jpg and said: 'look at this rabbit', I might not see that there is a bird there. The other famous example of this is the '13/B', which is explained well here: http://www.moillusions.com/2010/04/b-or-13-context-optical-illusion.html

Some obvious limitations are that your sample was obviously one of convenience rather than random, and it probably should have been bigger. Perhaps the kids could have also influenced each others responses if they weren't isolated from each other, that sort of thing. You're also assuming a level of education, an age and a specific cultural background.

[Glockmeister]

ERA can be quite difficult to many people, I know. Feel free to continue asking questions if any of the below doesn't make sense.

An Abstract, in essence is a summary of the entire paper that you have written. Because if this, it's probably best that you don't write this until you've actually finished writing everything else. It's usually about 200-250 words. Important things that might need to go on there are your aim/hypothesis, results, a small sampling of the interpretation of results and probably a bit of past research, although don't put all your research on there. Fundamentally, the point of the abstract is to entice the reader to keep reading ahead, as in the academic world, no one has time to go through a paper in its entirety.

The importance of studying visual perception and the perceptual set (worth 2 marks)

This requires a bit of creative thinking (I'm not going to directly give you an answer). Think about visual perception for the moment. Where would you use it in your life? What happens when these systems go wrong, for example, interpreting a instruction incorrectly? That's visual perception. What about perceptual set? Consider expectation, and its effects on decision making? You can afford to have broad strokes with this part.

Explanation of the interactive nature of the visual perception system

I suspect so, although check with your teacher to make sure.

Explanation of how perceptual set both facilitates perception and leads to perceptual errors (4 marks)  

This is going to be involving a lot of theory about perceptual set and what you've learnt about it in class. Basically, this is the section where you get to crap on about everything that you've learned about perceptual sets. How, when you have the Titchner circles, you see the centre circle as smaller than another centre circle depending on the size of the surrounding circles.

If you're not sure about what the perceptual set is, have a read here: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC10220/visper06.html

----------------------------------

I've sort of block of this section for the criticisms of experimental design, because I feel quite passionate about experimental design - weird I know. It's probably about the most important skill that you will take out of VCE Psychology. In essence, what you need to get into your head (and anyone else reading this) about these sorts of studies, as well as any piece of scientific literature that you may read for the rest of your life is that:

All experiments are flawed,but some experiments are more flawed than others.

There are two general errors really (this you don't need to know for VCE Psychology, but it's a good framework to think about these things). You have threats to external validity, and threats to internal validity (there's reliability as well, but you can't make a determination of that in one study, so ignore it). Internal validity refers to the structure of the study itself. For example, in a repeated measures design, you may have order effects. That is, the way that the kids viewed the images may have influenced the way they would ultimately view the ambiguous figure. A threat to external validity is where problems in the experiment prevent you from being able to generalise to the wider population (rendering your study useless). An example is situation effects age, time, culture set etc.

Hope that helps