Hi all, Last month I was contacted by Jim Tanaka, a professor in the Cognition and Brain Sciences program in the Psychology Department at the University of Victoria. His research focuses on visual expertise and perceptual experts, and he is currently working on a project to compare the identification strategies of expert birdwatchers in the New York area to the strategies of birdwatchers from the United Kingdom. In this study, New York and UK bird experts will view passerines from New York and the UK regions and judge their similarities. Some of you heard him describe his project at the end of today's Cayuga Bird Club webinar.
If you are interested in participating, see the information below. Suan --------------- Psychology Experiment Expert Birders Needed Experiment URL: https://psiz.org/collect/birds-region Time Commitment: ~30 minutes What is this study about? The purpose of this study is to examine the underlying cognitive mechanisms of visual bird identification. To probe cognition, we are collecting visual similarity judgments from expert birders living in the New York area and the United Kingdom. Visual similarity judgments are powerful because they allow us to better understand how birding strategies differ across regions. What is the task? Your task is to judge the visual similarity of passerines found in the New York area and the UK. Each session takes approximately 30 minutes and is composed of roughly 100 different trials. Each trial contains a grid of nine images. You must select the two images that you consider most similar to the center image. When you make your selections you will also indicate which image you believe is most similar and second most similar. The trials will vary in difficulty. The beginning of the session includes a brief survey of your birding experience. How do I participate? Thank you for your interest! Please send an email to proxybir...@gmail.com with the subject line ”Expert Participant Code” and your name in the email body. We will send you a unique participant code. Once you have your participant code, go to https://psiz.org/collect/birds-region and follow the instructions. Can I participate more than once? Yes! Every session has a different set of trials. We hope that you find the task interesting and participate multiple times. Just open the experiment in a new browser tab and reuse your participant code. You will not need to complete the survey a second time. Who is conducting this research? This study is being conducted by Victoria Philibert (University of Toronto), Dr. Brett Roads (University College of London), Dr. Chris Kanan (Rochester Institute of Technology) and Dr. James Tanaka (University of Victoria). If you have questions about this study, you may contact Dr. Tanaka by telephone (250-721-7541) or e-mail (jtan...@uvic.ca). -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
