Field Trip

Tuesday marked a field trip to the Communication & Cognition lab. All 17 students from my COMM 840 graduate seminar showed up to the lab for a small demonstration of psychophysiology. Good sport and lab member Tim Laubacher served as guinea pig for the demonstration.

We hooked up skin conductance and EKG sensors, and we all monitored Tim's physiology on-screen. Since no experiment is yet ready to go, we had to improvise. First, I threatened to show Tim the AARP Web page to see whether he was aroused by senior citizens.

Although there was no visible change in skin conductance, this did lead to the quotation of the night from Tim, "You know what's really arousing? The fear that you have that you will be aroused by old people." Har.

Other demonstrations included stepping on Tim's foot (arousing), yelling at Tim (arousing), threatening to show Tim the Boy Scouts Web page (not arousing), and trying to scare Tim with various Flash pop-ups that were not quite loud enough to startle (not arousing).

In all it was great fun, and more importantly, the session marked one more step toward creation of the vibrant lab atmosphere I enjoyed at Indiana.

In related news, the first-ever end-of-quarter Communication & Cognition lab party is this Friday at my house!