Extra credit is available for students who are willing to offer their time as participants in experiments run by other students in the Psychology department. So, capitalizing on the offer of extra credit for one of my classes, I signed up for an experiment without really knowing what it was about-- mistake #1. I signed the informed consent form and then sat behind a computer screen. The experimenter told me I had to press letters "z" and "p" on a keyboard in order to get coins to drop into a box on the computer screen. So I sat there idiotically, pressing the z and p keys for an hour. I tried figuring out some sort of pattern between the two keys to get the coins to drop faster but I couldn't figure it out. Out of frustration, I complained to the experimenter. "At least you don't have to do this all day like the test pigeons!" he replied. Great. A pigeon can do this and I am sitting her tapping buttons wondering why the coins aren't coming down faster. At the end of the experiment I asked the experimenter what the purpose of the experiment was, but he wouldn't tell me. Turns out, I had mistakenly signed up for a two day experiment. Next week, I have another hour long date with a computer program made for pigeons... lucky me.
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