Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Day 5: Still at the lab!

        From 9 am right up until 12pm Liz and I read the most grueling article by Keith Rayner titled 20 years of eye movement and reading. You all should go look it up and if you have some spare time, read it... :P. Afterwards we took a deserving break and made the trek uphill both ways to global village for some lunch. I once again ate a peanut butter and nutella sandwich. It is seriously the greatest combination of deliciousness.
        When we got back Liz and I buckled down and analyzed all our data from the word search. We decided to come up with a question for our research after we analyzed the data because all the possible questions we could think of were really general. After analyzing Kurt, Mike, and Karen's eye movement over the word search we decided to include another lab rat: Nadya. Our question ended up being what type of strategy is the most effective when trying to find as many words as possible in 5 minutes. Mike and Karen's strategy seemed to be the more effective one, but further experiments will help us draw a more valid conclusion. Karen and Mike used a scanning method where instead of going into the word search looking for a certain word, they just looked for words in general. When they think they found a word they would glance back to the word list and see if it was an option. This resulted in many more eye movements from the word list to the grid. Kurt and Nadya, on the other hand, went into the grid of words looking for a specific word and didn't try looking for another word until they found the one they were looking for. We came to that conclusion because both of them looked down at the word list far less frequently than Mike or Karen.
        At the end of the day Liz and I went to see Karen and told her all about what we discovered today. She answered a lot of questions we had about the article and gave us some useful ideas to further expand our little project into something longer!

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