Interference was the first
experiment that I helped with in the motion capture lab. When I began my mentorship, the experiment
was already underway. However I was able
to pick up the procedure quickly and it actually helped my learning of how to
run experiments in the mocap lab. The
basic hypothesis of the experiment is that depending on different conditions
presented to a person, they are more or less distracted and able to perform a
simple task that is given to them. In
order to test this theory, a series of movies were created using various
methods. These included a movie of a
man, a human model, an ellipsoidal figure and a yellow ball. In each of the movies, the figures would be
either moving their arm horizontally or vertically. A marker was placed on the right hand of the
participant and they were asked to follow along with a series of movies that
they saw. The twist in the experiment
was that a set of directions was shown to the participant prior to see each
movie and they were required to follow the directions that they read. As a result, the directions would either
direct the participant to move similarly to the figure they saw, such as
horizontal with horizontal, or move oppositely to the figure, such as
horizontal with vertical. We ran 64 separate
trials of the experiment which we afterwards had to clean and process. The data was then sent to the
