Weekly Assignment 1

The past few days I have kept coming to the weekly assignment and told myself, "Okay, I am going to do this..." Right as I am about to start I decide against it. Perhaps it was some sort of irrational inner fear that being my current age, thirty-nine, that my reaction times might be that of an eighty year-old man. Instead of the assignment I kept going back to scour the archives for journals as the key assignment looms all too close on the horizon. Tonight though was to be the time as I had to move on to other things in the course of the next week.

PART: One
Here I sat in the Sherrill Library and I began the test. As each new test finished I had to chuckle. The following is a crop of the screen capture of my results:

Starting the first test I found myself wondering where the dot would be. Would it be random? How long would it be on screen for? Am I too old for this? My result of .39 seconds was actually what I thought to be fairly decent. As there is no one else here to compare to, I can only compare to how I did on the second test.

Test two added the floating designs and I was worried that I would get into moments of looking at the pretty colors. The distractions are afterall the idea of the test - to see how the added stimulus affected our reaction times. Yeah, not sure this was supposed to happen, but I improved to .359 seconds. Chuckling, I was curious what this says about me.

Next came test three and it included a warning that some of the images were meant to cause an emotional reaction. Perhaps I am without emotion, a regular Vulcan (wait they have emotion just choose to suppress them - yes I am a dork) as my reaction time dropped to .33 seconds.

Now I was getting cocky. Part three with basic math problems? Psssh...no problem at all. I was able to answer each question easily enough with time to spare but yet my time slowed to .398 seconds. 

According to the unit, current research has established "...that both hemispheres are involved in almost all cognitive tasks." Unit 1 Text Section 2. If we leave out the theory of left-brain versus right-brain, perhaps my brain is just better equipped and developed to process more creative and emotionally driven situations and tasks? Analytical problems present a slightly great challenge but yet the differences between reaction times appear marginal to my untrained eye.


PART: Two
On set one I really seemed to get hung up on the police car. Not sure why, but my brain simply could not process and remember where the T was. It was not until the last picture or so that my eyes and brain knew exactly where to look.

None too surprisingly, my reaction times improved for repeated images while the newer pictures truly seemed to throw me off as I would be expecting an image I had already seen.

The second set, the Sharp set also gave me some difficulties. There was one image in particular that truly slowed down my processing. The picture of the "black hole" acted like a black hole of image processing as it sucked my grey matter out of existence or maybe into some parallel dimension. Can I please have it back?

I was happy to see that even with the black hole, my reaction times improved with the images.

When progressing through the blurred set it seemed like all the T's just jumped out at me. I spotted each and every one with relative ease. The difference between the new images and the repeated images was minimal. According to the results page, people with dyslexia often have an easier time with the blurred set - this statement made me think.

Over the years I have had difficulty in learning, but never to the point or in terms of possibly being diagnosed with dyslexia. I am a slow reader but have improved. I am a very visual person and that also slows me down to a point. But how do those fit in to this blurred set? 

The final set was the abstract set. As soon as I launched the practice, I knew that I would be in for trouble. I have always had rather poor vision and that will always be the case. My eyes are always tracing letters while reading and that slows me down. I read a lot and that certainly has helped train my brain to simply acknowledge what letters and words are in front of me as opposed to challenging the validity of every letter. I knew my brain would react "violently" to this set.

While taking this test my eyes kept running over each and every angle. The black and white would blur together. Then it seemed like the gears kicked-in and  my brain decided to "look for smaller angles". Actually I guess that while this is what I was thinking, I meant smaller radials from the angle. The unusual part is, I recall consciously thinking this as my mind started to undertake the new task and I felt as though my ability to find the T's improved. On the other hand, I could not tell you which pictures were repeats and which were new. I would have to attribute this to my searching each shape as opposed to seeing the "big picture".