Cognitive Tests And Measuring The Abstract

This post will discuss methods that can be used to test subjects in priming and related psychological experiments.

Some of the difficulties that arise in many cognitive psychological studies can be attributed to the large amount of variables that may influence results. For example, when measuring the emotional or motivational state of a subject, researchers must carefully target their measure of this so as not to include irrelevant material that may influence their results. Secondly, cognitive psychology researchers must consider the intrinsic subjectivity of their field. If two similar labs were conducting similar research on the perception of an emotion such as happiness, their results could be completely different depending on their method of measurement. To reduce the potential of error due to the above factors, researchers have historically used well-targeted measures that can be easily replicated. In some branches of psychology, there are "standard" tests (that give certain scores) used for studies of a certain nature. You can find some of these listed here. Here are a couple interactive tests if you're in the mood: test your memory and reaction time here. The two links above should give you an idea of what psychological testing can look like.

A standard spatial reasoning test: which cube unfolds into the shape above?

Historically, priming has involved tests of reaction time, spatial reasoning, emotional state, memory, behavior, persistence, intellectual arousal, and the list could go on. For instance, when the Mozart effect was first officially "discovered," Rauscher et al. 1993 measured spatial reasoning. With the advancement of technology, brain scans like EEGs (electroencephalograms) measuring neural activity are becoming increasingly common. An interesting study in 2007 led by Mathias Pessiglione used brain scans to give empirical evidence for the influence of money on motivation (PDF found here).

An example EEG from Wikipedia

Anyways, what I think I'll be measuring is emotional state (which I should be able to connect to intellectual arousal), persistence on a difficult task, perhaps the results of that task, and attention levels during a short educational video. I'm still in the process of reading through studies testing similar things for ideas, but I'm hoping to find an appropriate test for emotion/intellectual arousal that's been used several times before. 

I'm looking to get my tests completed in the next few weeks, so check back for updates! Thanks!