Paid Psychology Experiments This Week

When I came back to Leicester to work, my goal was to earn as much money as I physically could over these two weeks. So, in addition to working as Graduation staff and as Ambassador during two Open Days, I also signed up for some paid psychology experiments!
During term time we have always been expected to collect 21 credits, earned by being participants for third year’s dissertation experiments. In that case, the credits are our reward, but there are other experiments being carried out at the university, some of which are paid. They are mostly advertised through the department and through the University’s newsletter, which we receive every week in form of email. The ones I signed up for were really different from one another.

One asked me to perform some spatial tasks in a Virtual Reality Environment. It involved the use of 3D glasses, and was looking at foraging strategies. It was alright, I just got kind of motion sick by the end of the experiment (which lasted around 1h).
The second one was about Auditory Working Memory, and I had to attend to musical stimuli and identify whether they were repeated over time, either with or without a distracting noise in the background.
And then, to wrap up nicely, I took part in an EEG experiment. The experiment itself was about face perception in the peripheral visual field, but I was interested in seeing how an EEG setup worked!

So yeah, apart from getting money (which never hurts) I also got some first-hand experience of three very different experimental settings. Which is always something I appreciate, since we will become experimenters next year, and some of us possibly will choose career path!