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Web offers opportunity to participate in research
At this point in the semester, research may not seem like much fun. However, you can have some studying down time participating in online research studies.
An entertaining place to start is the Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews School of Psychology, Scotland. To support research in perception and vision, the lab hosts ongoing online experiments dealing with the perception of human faces, including prototyping, aging and attractiveness. Those 18 and older can participate in experiments—brief online quizzes in which participants rate attractiveness and other factors related to facial images—and donate their own faces to science. But perhaps the biggest bonus is the opportunity to play with the lab’s morphing software, part of the “Face of the Future” project. At this site, you can “transform yourself” by uploading an image and applying various morphs to try on other ages, ethnicities and artistic styles. The resulting images can be stunningly beautiful or so very wrong they’re painful. The biggest bonus is that all images may be saved for personal download and use—consequently, the avatar applications are endless.
Also affiliated with the Perception Lab is the Face Research Laboratory. Run by researchers at the University of Aberdeen, it also hosts experiments and tools related to facial imagery and “how people read faces and the ways in which this relates to experiences they have during their life”. The site requires registration and then offers a variety of online surveys and several tools for transforming images, including the ability to upload and save your own images. Warning: the result of averaging one’s own face with one’s pets is not as pretty as one might think!
There are various clearinghouses that provide links to online research projects. For example, the University of Hanover maintains a list of ongoing Psychological Research on the Net. The Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology of the University of Rochester conducts online research studies and also links to other studies. WebExperiment.net, developed by researchers at the Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Liverpool, hosts research surveys in social and biological sciences. The Social Psychology Network provides a particularly interesting range of online studies related to relationships, including “The Breakup Study,” “Regrets Regarding Romantic Relationships” and “Secrecy and Romantic Relationships.”
If participating in research catches your fancy, there are real-world opportunities closer to home. CURCA, UB’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities, offers help and advice for those students who would like to participate in research activities at UB via its Web site. Although no online-only research studies currently are highlighted, the opportunity to contribute within one’s immediate community and/or within one’s chosen discipline should imbue the fun of research with even greater purpose.
—Nancy Babb, University Libraries