Orienting to Volume Changes--More IFS data!!!

Classes start for the Fall Semester tomorrow...well, today for those on a Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule. And, I've spent the past few days getting syllabi ready for the coming term. One of the fortunate things is that I'm teaching "This is your Brain on Media,", the class I taught for IFS, again this semster as an S105 seminar. I was therefore able to keep what worked during IFS and revise what didn't.


As you may suspect if you've been following this blog lately, one thing that did work well was the student experiments. And, it's time to report on another one.


This was the second "Attention Group." They were interested in abrupt changes in volume in media and whether such a change would result in the automatic allocation of cognitive resources to processing the message. This is a phenomenon known as the orienting response. At first, the group seemed intent upon testing this in movie clips...but they had trouble finding examples...even though they were "sure they had seen them"!

In the end, music was what they selected (which The Audio Prof did not discourage!). The found four songs where the music was very quiet for an extended time and then got very loud. Furthermore, two of the songs were familar (Ironic from Alanis Morrisette and Bring Me to Life from Evanescence) and two of them were unfamiliar local bands that one of the students knew.


The students collected heart rate data during the songs presentations, which were played in random order to 4 other students. Then, they identified the points in each song where the volume change occurred. Here's what they found:

Now an orienting response is identified with a momentary deceleration in heart rate. And, this graph shows changes from the point at which the volume change occurred (the place where both lines are at "0" on the left side of the figure). And, you see that heart rate went down for both types of songs...so, they oriented to the volume changes just like the students thought would happen. Plus, they wondered whether familiarity with the song would have an impact. And, it seems that it did...the orienting responses were larger if the subject didn't know the song. Makes sense, right?

Congratulations to "Attention Group, Music" members:

David Benmen, Michelle Feder, Eliot Suitor-Feld, and Alexandra Wojtal

A look at some IFS data

I'm sure I have said this at least once over the last three weeks, but IFS is extremely intensive. Not only for the students, but also for the professors. At church this morning I saw two other professors who are in the program, and all three of us are exhausted. I don't know whether to feel discouraged or uplifted that the other two professors have done IFS before...and are still wiped out!

My family has gone off on this hot and muggy Indiana afternoon to go swimming at a friend's pool. I decided to stay home, somewhat because I wanted to get a blog posting up, but also because I'm just tired.

Looking back on the three-week experience, I am amazed at how far the students and I were able to get. Over the course of 15 days, four different student groups were able to generate their own original research hypotheses, identify the independent and dependent variables in them, find examples of media stimuli to satisfy the different levels of the independent variable, collect physiology data as dependent variables, analyze that data and present it to the class!!

Over the next few blog postings I've like to give you a sense of the very interesting questions and results they generated. The first week was devoted to questions about attention to media. In the ICR we primarily use heart rate as an indication of attention/cognitive effort. The first group to collect data wondered whether people would pay different amounts of attention to television stories depending upon whether they were exposed to audio-video presentations, video-only presentations, or audio-only presentations. Those of you familiar with this type of media research, will find this question to be highly influenced by the reading the students did in the Reeves & Nass book entitled The Media Equation. Of course, as an instructor, this made me ecstatic because it meant they were actually reading the textbook!

So, the members of "attention group lizard" found segments of video online from the National Geographic Channel (that's where they got their name) and manipulated them to meet the different levels of their independent variable. And although, like all the data I'll present from IFS, they only had time to run three or four of their classmates through the experiment, here's what they found:

It's obvious that most of the differentiation is in the early part of each message, which appears on the left-hand side of the graph. Substantially lower heart rate (indicating more attention) occurs during the "monkey" video clip. In this video clip there was only video in the students concluded that subjects paid more attention early on during that portion of the stimulus presentation because we are quite unpracticed at processing television shows without any sort of audio. Helping them to reach this conclusion, was the fact that the least amount of attention was paid during the clip that contains both audio and video -- the same way we are so accustomed to watching television.

Congratulations to the members of this group:

Andrew Platkin · Jeremy Rytych · Adam Siemer · Tommy Scott · Logan Gants

and best of luck during your time here at IU!

Quick bit of Audio News

I'm in the middle of adminstering the second unit exam to the IFS class. I can't believe how hard these guys have been working, and how much ground we've covered in 10 days!

I'll be posting some of the (quite impressive) data that the research groups collected during their lab days over the next few posts.

But, for now, I thought I'd pass on a story of a big radio conglomerate--one that often gets bad press as the evil empire--doing good.

Story (thanks to Media Week): Clear Channel creates The Pink Channel.

Here's the XM page for The Pink Channel

This is your Brain on the Lilly Library

One of the things that the Intensive Freshmen Seminars are designed to do is introduce the new freshmen to wonderful opportunities and facilities here on the IUB campus. For lack of a better word, we take FIELD TRIPS. Now, sometimes these fit nicely with the content of the course. My colleague, Andrew Weaver, is teaching an IFS course on Human Agression. He was able to send his students to the IU Art Museum and ask them to look for examples of violent or agressive behavior represented in art. Great idea!

Other times, the field trips are only tangentially connected. But, they still seem encouraged by the IFS. For my course, some of the connections seemed a stretch...I sent them to the art musuem, and I suppose art is a medium...

But, yesterday, we visited the Lilly Library...a special collections library that I'm sad to say I hadn't yet visited in my 10 years in Bloomington. It was fabulous! And, the students had an engaging time. Check this out:

Here's Brittany and student Jeremy looking at a sample of the library's collection of miniature books.

Sam takes a picture of one of the worlds only Gutenberg Bibles.

My IFS intern Jeremy looks at an Audobon painting.

One of the biggest "hits" of the visit was the Jerry Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection. Here are Stephanie, Adam, Michael and Meg stretching their brains in different ways.

And finally, here's Ross holding one of John Ford's Oscar statues! After all, Ford won 4 of them...more than any other director...so I guess he could donate at least one, 'eh?

Ross is interested in becoming a Telecommunications major...and so I told him there is a fair chance that this won't be the last Oscar gold he'll hold

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.

Meet the Parents

So, yesterday evening the IFS summer started.

In an introdutory meeting with my 18 students...AND (at least some of) THEIR PARENTS.
I have to admit what I admitted to them...that this meeting made me somewhat nervous. Likely because I'm not used to having two different ages of "audience."

But, it turned out to be a blast. Great group of people. Some came from rather far away--Memphis TN, Long Island, Memphis. But, many were from the Indiana/Illinois/Missouri area. All excited and nervous and tired (it was a very hot day for them to have been moving in).

And now, tomorrow, it all starts for real. Three hour class from 9-noon.