This afternoon I helped advance the collective knowledge of the world.  I participated in a psychology study.

Stanford has a storied history of psychology studies, such as the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.  Fortunately, the study I took part in was quite benign.

The two-part, web-based test took place in a small room in the psychology building.  The first part resembled the Age Project: I was shown photos of faces and was asked to judge their ages.  In the second part, I was shown a short video of two blue squares moving around the screen.  The one question I was asked about the video: did I think of the squares as people?  That association hadn’t crossed my mind, but I did think the video looked a bit like Pong.

Even though the proctor emphasized the second part of the study, I suspect that the first part was the focus of the research.  The follow-up questions were primarily about the faces.  Also, the face photos seemed odd in some hard-to articulate way.  I know that at least one of the face photos was shown twice, and some of the photos seemed to have strange proportions or non-matching features.  Maybe it was my imagination running wild in a desperate effort to discover the true thrust of the study.  Maybe what I perceived was real.

With studies, the true goal is often veiled to prevent bias, so I might never know the actual goal.  With luck, I will run across it in print someday.