• Question: What is your favourite experiment you have ever done?

    Asked by anon-188261 to Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 15 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 15 Nov 2018:

      Hi Ava thanks for your question. My favorite experiment was also the most extinguishing one I did. I worked as a junior scientist at Swansea University. For this study we had to stay up all night watching our participants sleep records and waking them up (with a buzzer) when they entered certain stages of sleep. We wanted to see how dreams differed in different stages of sleep. We would ask them questions via a recording device, and later ‘code’ these to look at the differences. It was fun hearing about all the weird and interesting things people were dreaming about, we got some interesting results published, and I made very good friends with my lab partner 🙂

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 15 Nov 2018:

      Hi Ava,

      Lovely question. I work on understanding how what we know about how people pay attention and learn new information in the world differs between traditional research (that typically uses just visual or just auditory etc. objects) and how information is typically presented in the real world – across multiple senses at once (“multisensory information”). One such incomplete idea is that children are “just more distractful adults”. This has been shown many times, but only with visual information. And in the outside world information is typically multisensory. So when I was in Oxford, we studied young and older children and adults on a task where they searched for visual objects (like green circles and red squares), and whenever there was a new search array, there was always a distractor in the periphery – visual, sound and multisensory (visual and sound presented from the same side of space). I think you know where I’m going with this. And indeed, children were more distracted than adults – when we looked at visual distractors. But when we looked at multisensory distractors, actually children were in some cases “protected” from their influence – but adults were distracted! So children are NOT ALWAYS more distracted adults, the story is more complex than this! 🙂
      I wrote a short article about these findings – written in an accessible way – have a look! 🙂 https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00008

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