As the bell to signal the end of second period finishes sounding, students gather in the campus room, along hallways and in clusters around the gym: the usual hot spots during FLEX time. Today, a group of about 20 students are meeting in the health room, randomly selected to participate in a special psychology study.
“For our final project [in psychology]…the sky’s the limit,” said junior Summer Olson, a student in Julie Johnson’s first semester psychology class. “Danielle [Pattison] and I decided that we were going to do something with color and memory. So, we are basically trying to see if people remember images with their favorite color or if there is a certain color that they remember best.”
Psychology students have recently begun work on their final projects for this semester, which can be on any topic or area of psychology they find intriguing.
Interested in studies of memory and color, juniors Olson and Pattison created a test for a group of six random students from each grade, half male and half female, and performed the test today during FLEX time.
A diagram depicts the six different components of the brain. Olson and Pattison’s study focuses on memory, a function of the Temporal lobe. Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.“We took animal coloring pages from a kid’s book and colored them people’s favorite colors,” said Olson. “We had them look at it for 30 seconds and then they had a minute to write down what they remembered. So, we’re seeing if there’s a correlation between the colors [different students] remembered.”
Psychology students will continue work on their final projects, performing tests, collecting data and interpreting it, in the next few weeks to come.