Online Reaction Time Experiment and Lab Report Writing in APA Style

Task

Task:

you will participate in an online experiment on reaction time located within the psychology learning tools - complete the reaction time experiment here. Completing the experiment is only to give you an idea of how the experiment works so you can better write the methods section of the paper since you will write the paper as if you are the researcher who conducted the experiment. Once you have completed the experiment you will need to analyze the data (see below) and write a lab report in APA style consisting of the following sections: Title Page Abstract Introduction Method Results Discussion References DATA - Just like the mini lab report, you will participate in the online experiment so you know what the experiment is like. You are given the data to analyze. Here is the data file Data REPORT - You will write the report as if you were the researcher conducting the experiment. You have some options in your research question for this project.

The data you are given includes the gender and age of the participants as well as three columns of results data (from 3 tasks). If you have a particular interest and want to modify the data, you have that choice. We will talk about this in week 4. The tasks can be described as follows: A simple reaction time task in which participants press a key as quickly as possible after the stimulus (in this case, a block of color) has been presented. Think of it as a simple "Whack A Mole" game at an arcade. You react every time you see something pop up. A Go/NoGo reaction time task in which participants respond to one particular event (e.g., a red block of color) but ignore other events (e.g., a green block). Think of this GNG task like playing "Fruit Ninja" where you have to slice the fruit but not the bombs. A choice reaction time task in which participants respond differentially to two stimuli by pressing one key for event A and a separate key for event B. Compare this task to a game, for example, where you are skateboarding and have to decide whether to duck or jump when you get to obstacles. The data in the cells is the actual reaction time. Think about what might impact someone's reaction time for each of the three tasks and which might fit your study best (reading previous research on your topic will help with this decision as well).

Please only choose 1 IV and 1 DV for your study. Do not run multiple analyses or pick more than one IV or DV. Keep it simple since this is the first time most of you will have completed a research report of this nature. Formatting & Grading - Careful attention must be paid to APA style as it represents a significant portion of your grade for the paper and is an intended learning outcome for the course. At the end of the term you will submit your completed paper to your assignment folder.