Designing visual stimuli for psychological experiments
Psychological experiments require well-controlled stimuli for research to be efficient and replicable. To conduct research on brain activity related to visual perception, I helped a team of neuroscientists and medical students test and develop a set of visual images that research participants would perceive differently from one showing to the next. The research for this project led to a library of reusable experimental images that were used in multiple published studies. This is work from one of the many experiments I helped to design as a career neuroscientist. See more on my Neuroscience page.
Goals
​Design Research Goals
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Create reliably ambiguous stimuli for future use in psychological experiments
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Evaluative and Behavioral Research Goals
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Understand what characteristics of an image make it ambiguous to research participants
Methods
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Eye tracking
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Statistical analysis of images
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Statistical analysis of participant behavior
Crucial insights
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Research participants' perception of ambiguous images varies highly (which makes for interesting science!)
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Certain statistical properties of images reliably influenced participants' perception -- objects with longer straight edges were generally easier to recognize, for example
Research impact
​Strategic impact
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I created a curated library of visual stimuli that met the rigorous standards for the scientific experiment. The stimuli were used in 3 subsequent open-access scientific publications (Chang et al., 2016; Gonzalez-Garcia et al., 2018; Flounders et al., 2019), boosting the publication record for the Perception and Brain Dynamics Lab
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Stakeholder impact
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Self and business stakeholders: Current and future researchers that became part of the lab went on to use the stimuli for future experiments.
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Societal stakeholders: Influence reached outside of the lab, with the studies being cited 85 times as of December, 2022
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Product impact
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The set of stimuli were reusable components to multiple experiments. These well-controlled stimuli were crucial to creating quality research publications
Experimental paradigm and images designed and tested for subsequent experiments. Image from Chang et al., 2016
Behavioral results from Chang et al., 2016
Behavioral results from Gonzalez-Garcia et al., 2018
Behavioral and brain results from Flounders et al., 2019
What I learned
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New research software for eye tracking and creating visual stimuli
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Methods for analyzing the statistical properties of images
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Your work can continue to impact stakeholders long after you've formally left an organization