Group 44

Day 1-3:
For the psychology fair, my group and I will be doing a demonstration on perceptual set. Perceptual set is using past experiences for future experiences. We will dye lemonade different colors. Before the participants try the drink, we will ask them what flavor they think it is. Once the participants take a sip of the drink, we will ask them what flavor they taste. My group and I believe that people will say the flavor they associate with the color of the drink when they see the drink, and when they taste the drink they will taste the flavor they thought it was from looking at it. Most companies use the same colors for the same flavors, so the participants will most likely use this past experience as they taste the dyed lemonade. People associate certain colors with certain flavors.
 My group and I have been working on five handouts and we finished all of them today. The handouts include:

• In the first handout, we divided up the work between the four members of our group. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R9Kq2lMQkZ35dPqCkIl6Q9e_b_GsNfS0wG48VR7CCs4/edit?usp=sharing 
• In the second handout, we filled out the information we already know about our topic, what we want our audience to know, and what we need to know. My group and I had a specific experiment that we wanted to do about perceptual set from the start, so we knew quite a bit about our topic. One thing we would like to know more about is why perceptual set tricks people into tasting the wrong flavor.  https://docs.google.com/document/d/19rwyIE2i9pDinvSRQP41ZuLUeiqOCX0xhAOYNrGAhtQ/edit?usp=sharing 
• The third handout we completed consisted of research. We researched studies that have been done on taste and perceptual set. All of the studies we found dyed drinks different colors and asked people to describe what they tasted. In all three studies, a large portion of the participants tasted a flavor based on the color of the drink, not the actual flavor. My group and I expect to find similar results to these background studies.  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JP8YFgJncXnt7MdWY8AyjBX1SfloD8VPR-QRoU2_ft8/edit?usp=sharing  
• My group and I created a thesis in the fourth handout. Before we created our thesis, we listed testable relationships and created possible cause and effect questions about the relationships we identified. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AaJaLyVhX6awXt7xbACY21fLkLYcZuAQRgJN4WsX6UY/edit?usp=sharing 
• In the fifth handout, my group and I identified all of the variables. The independent variable is the color of the drink, the dependent variable is the flavor reported, the confounding variable is the possibility of someone already knowing about our experiment which might prevent us from tricking them, and our control group is participants who try the undyed lemonade.  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B1Y25IeHkY9v4G4iIFc6QxmCjB7RnQfWN8Gy6Hnxt2g/edit?usp=sharing 

Day 4:

It is day four of working on our psychology fair project! Today we were assigned student handouts 16 and 17. We finished both handouts in class today.

• Handout 16 required my group and I to establish our research activity procedure. My group and I feel confident in the procedure we set up. In our experiment we are trying to measure what flavor participants think the flavor is by looking at the color of the drink and report what flavor they taste. Participants will be tested individually and we do not want other people to watch our experiment. The validity of our process could be affected if participants have heard of our experiment before or if their friends tell them what happens in it. This would affect our process because the participants would know that both drinks are actually lemonade. In order to prevent this from happening, we will ask that participants not share their results with others when they are done. Also, people might be affected if they know what other people answer to the questions we ask them. This is because they might say the drink looks like and tastes like a flavor that another person said it looked and tasted like. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18NBe_umHa3XjIymXFsHuX5QoJMjf7oedtdilt3MDRtk/edit?usp=sharing
• Handout 17 was a survey that had a checklist of things that our project must follow and consist of. My group and I were able to check off all of the things on the checklist. This means that we will not have to make any major changes to our research project. https://docs.google.com/a/d230.org/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeSwD7p0Pf7HMdRzALIikFNL9ljsrx8V1EOlmHV5S4lhxkpcw/viewform 

Day 5:

Today my group and I were assigned student handouts 18, 19, and 20. We finished handout 19 and 20 in class. 

• Handout 19 is a student work request form. The point of us filling this out was to let our teacher know if we needed any special location at the psychology fair or if we needed special equipment or photocopies. You can see what we decided we did and did not need in this link.    https://docs.google.com/document/d/11TOVo4_MEkOlXckNqHOR-Rt-ScwLBCiWayBbPDowilY/edit?usp=sharing   
• Handout 20 is titled "Creating Your Materials List". It is basically a checklist of all of the supplies our group needs for the psychology fair. We had to write the item, amount, cost, item secured, and if the item must be returned. We need quit a lot of supplies. Our group needs items to carry out the process, items for clean-up, and items for our table. You can view all of the supplies we need to the following link.    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wQ0zI9FrhDMaekn3AoUTpbHKG1FtjtYL-YdIxhKec0A/edit?usp=sharing

 

Day 6:

Today, we finished handout number 18. Handout 18 is a rough draft of our psychology fair paper. The rough draft consisted of our booth title, explanation of our topic, a description of the activities at our booth, our hypothesis, and a citation list. You can view our rough draft in the following link.     https://docs.google.com/document/d/10RuHpRpdJ4NzSzxWG-N7J5noT01pCDxUGyPVQZ0m_nA/edit?usp=sharing

Day 7:

It's Friday! We are on track with our project and plan to get it done within the next couple of days. We bought a tri-fold poster board to decorate for our table at the psych fair. On the poster we will include background information from our research. Also, my group and I will try to make it eye catching and interactive. We have started to buy supplies for the psychology fair. I bought the cups we need for the project today. 

Day 8:

Today we worked on our poster. We designed the poster and typed what we want on the poster so that we can print it out. My group and I created two google sheets to put our data in. One of the data sheets is for the control group and the other data sheet is for the experimental group. Also, we decided how much lemonade each of us is bringing and who is dying the lemonade red. We are each bringing three gallons of lemonade and two of us are dying the ones we bring red. This way 6 gallons of lemonade will be for the control group (undyed) and the other six of them will be for the experimental group (dyed red). We will be buying gallons of water and country time lemonade powder to make the lemonade ourselves. Here are the requirements for the poster:    https://docs.google.com/document/d/13NH9M2nFz0ko28rOHLi-JdCeeMVKIGnllGQHCDRzZZ4/edit#heading=h.pk4iazi1uky1   

Day 9:

My group is done with everything for the psych fair! Today we talked about what supplies each of us are getting over break. As long as we all get the supplies we will be all set!

Day 10:

Today is parent night! In class my group and I talked about what we want to accomplish at parent night. We decided that we are going to see how well our experiment works and if we need to change anything. 

Later that day...

The parent night was extremely helpful! We found that when we put red food coloring in the lemonade it was not a dark red. Since the red was not dark, people thought that it tasted like pink lemonade. This caused us to decide to dye the lemonade purple by mixing red and blue food coloring. Once the lemonade was dyed purple our experiment worked better. More of the participants were fooled by the purple drink thinking that it tasted like grape or blueberry. 

My group and I are all ready for the psych fair! Hopefully it will go as planned tomorrow!

 

Day 11:

Today was the day we've been waiting for...psych fair day!!! Overall, today went really well! We had about 465 people come to our booth throughout the course of the day. We had extremely mixed data. 

For the control group (undyed lemonade), most people thought that the drink looked like lemon and tasted like lemon. A couple of people thought that the control group drink looked like pineapple and tasted like lemon. A few people thought that the lemonade looked and tasted like lime and a couple of people tasted sour apple. Three people said that the undyed lemonade tasted like grape. I think that people who thought the lemonade tasted like lime or sour apple tasted the sourness and citrusness of the lemonade and that is why they tasted those flavors. As for the people who tasted grape, I believe that they assumed they were tasting grape because the drink next to the yellow one was purple. They probably thought we switched the colors of the two flavors to trick them.   

For the experimental group the data has a ton of variations. The flavors people guessed by only looking at the drink include grape, cherry, raspberry, blueberry, apple, pomegranate, fruit punch, grapefruit, kiwi, black cherry, cranberry, strawberry, and pink lemonade. The majority of people thought that the drink looked grape flavored. Participants tasted grape, strawberry, lemon, blueberry, apple, cherry, water, green apple, grapefruit, orange, raspberry, lime, fruit punch, iced tea, kool aid, pomegranate, and sour apple. Some of the participants tasted the flavor they said it looked like (falling for the trick), some participants tasted the real flavor of the drink (lemon), and many other participants tasted a flavor that was different than the flavor they said it looked like and different than the real flavor of the drink (lemon). The people who tasted the same flavor as the one they said it looked like support our hypothesis. Those who tasted the real flavor of the drink were most likely not influenced by perceptual set. I'm not exactly sure why people tasted a flavor other than the one they said the drink looked like or the real flavor. Perhaps it was due to the influence of what others thought or because they knew they were tasting a flavor other than the one they said, but they couldn't tell what they were tasting. 

It seems like some participants knew that we were trying to mess with them, so they changed their answers in order to try to not be tricked by us. Another group did a very similar experiment as us, so some people said that they caught on and knew what we were doing. We could tell that people really had to think about what they were tasting. Also, my group and I could tell that some participants seemed to be attempting to outsmart the system. 

My group and I had a lot of fun today! It was very interesting to see what people thought the flavors were! We also loved seeing our classmates psych fair projects!

Below are some pictures from the psych fair:

 

Day 12:

Today is one of the last days of our psych fair project. My group and I completed the statistics for our data. We created a bar graph and found the correlation for both the experimental group data and the control group data. Also, we worked on our final written report. The final report is basically a summary of our experiment and what happened the day of the psych fair. 

Links for statistics:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U__lvX5bQ0Ov5xFf7pjUSpum9ChwH0w4WgWG-AZJJ7E/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WXDUdgXW2nU04KoXnCaG2sNr33_RPxdNVlQX-h5xVTI/edit?usp=sharing 

Link for Final Report:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Az-3wnX--TeZ2b37l1IAr86zr6ii00NzlO7s0P8sHj4/edit?usp=sharing