| Chapter 1: Ethical Issues Importance of academic honesty and open-mindedness: Sometimes it may be hard to choose between million-dollar grants/prestige/ego and honesty/openness/acceptance of being wrong. As researchers, it is very important to expose our assumptions in order to be honest and clarify what our prior beliefs and expectations are. Two examples of hidden assumptions that mudied the research literature: Strategy use in children Older adults' declining cognitive performance The way we analyze our data has also a great influence on the conclusions we can draw. For next time, please go to http://www.unb.ca/psychology/likely/experimenters/reaction_time.htm and do the 2 demonstrations "Reaction Time" and "Donders and the speed of thought." Do the first demonstration 10 times and get your average reaction time. Do the second demonstration 10 times and get your average reaction time. Compare your averages. Does this difference really result from having to make a choice, or is there a confounding variable? Also, as we'll be considering cognitive science and artificial intelligence, you may be interested to visit Xavier at Carnegie-Mellon: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~Xavier/ It used to take pictures and tell Xavier jokes but I don't think that's operational anymore. |
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