First week of IFS is in the books

It's been a wonderful week in S105 as me and a group of 18 freshmen have embarked on exploring how the human brain interacts with mediated messages as psychological stimuli rather than just genres of entertainment.

I've been amazed at how far the group has come in a short time. They are exhausted and slightly overwhelmed at the speed with which we've covered stuff. And, frankly, so am I. That's why they are called INTENSIVE Fresmen Seminars, I suppose.

But, in five short days we've been able to have two different groups (my attention groups) come up with separate hypotheses concerning what causes us to pay different amounts of attention to media. Plus, we have been in the ICR lab collecting data to test those hypotheses. Interestingly, one of the hypotheses focused on television and the other on audio-only media (music).

Here's a few pictures of some of them in the lab yesterday.


Eliot making sure Brittany is comfortable getting ready to have her heart rate measured.

Eliot again (I think, with his back to us) and Alex (watching the EKG on the computer monitor) discuss the heart rate data being collected with my IFS intern Jeremy.
In Lab A, Tommy kept meticulous notes about the four subjects his group collected data from...plus had a great sense of humor about it all that helped those being "hooked up" relax.

Tommy's group has already been able to analyze their data, and found some pretty interesting results. I won't spoil the story now...they haven't presented it to the other students yet, but be checking back.