FROM COLOR WHEELS (1903) TO IPADS (2010): THE IMPACT

OF TECHNOLOGY ON PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Charles Burdsal

Wichita State University

Psychologists have long been enamored with equipment. This is an interesting but a bit strange history.

The early psychophysics researchers need equipment. Here’s a color wheel circa 1903.

Many devices were used in research, most of which were a single function.

Here is a relatively early device aimed at measuring reaction time under various conditions.

A few more contraptions we used.

The period from the late 1950’s thru about 1975 brought a wealth of new research aids, particularly with the ascendency of operant conditioning research. Here’s a real life “Skinner Box.”

For those of you who don’t quite remember, here’s how they worked.

There was some other equipment during that period (some still used today) that seems a bit odd:

There was a “grip strength” meter for rats:

There were a couple of other interesting pieces of equipment from that period: First, a pair of glasses with prisms, not the inverted images

that Pronko used. They allowed you to determine what the participant saw:

You could point one side in one direction, the other side in a different direction. Probably produced a substantial amount of nausea.

Now my favorite of the lot. The “Rodent Toe Pincher.” Yes you heard me correctly!:

It measures how much pressure it takes before the rat “hollers.” Apparently this is actually useful in the medical world to test local anesthetics.

Finally, in the late 60’s early 70’s we started entering the digital age.

We had our equipment – relays, volume controls, automatic feeders, all mounted on a “rack.”

So how did we initially tell all this equipment what to do?

PATCH boards!

Here’s a blank one:

Essentially, each “hole” is connected to a device. For example, you could “plug in” a feeder to a timer such that by adjusting the timer, a pellet of food would be given at a specific interval.

Yes, this could get quite complicated and generally did.

If you set one up as in the next picture and found out it “didn’t work right,” imagine debugging it!

Here’s one that has been programmed:

Patch boards are still used today, but primarily in electronics.

Analyzing data collected has truly been an evolution.

I started in graduate school doing ANOVA’s on a Friden Rotary Calculator:

It got much better with the all electronic Friden 130:

Overlapping the development of calculators was the mainframe computer access particularly at Universities.

My first experience with a mainframe computer!

This is the first one I used was an IBM 1620:

We went through a series of mainframes each increasing what we could do in terms of both the speed of computing and the sophisticated analyses we could do.

One of the larger and last mainframes before the focus changed was the IBM 390:

Or the Cray super computer of the period:

For a perspective, the development of large mainframes occurred from about 1930 to 1975 (approximately). The development of microcomputers was from about 1972 to date.

Not to long after I was awarded my Ph.D. came what was going to be a game changer – the Apple II.

One of the real advantages to psychologists that the microcomputer provides is both data analysis and experimental control.

AND there have been many advances since the Apple II.

The most recent ones we use in our computer classrooms are the Dell 990’s:

As you know, there are many choices of personal micros all the way up to a gamer’s dream the 12 TFLOP Fastra desktop size super computer:

To very fast sleek laptops:

And they have gotten even more portable:

Computers are not the only advance in tools we use. The use of the fMRI has really expanded in cognitive neuroscience:

Data collection devices such as clickers:

Are available. One company offers (for a fee of course) to turn student cell phones into clickers.

Where this is going is a good question!

I hope there is as much progress as has occurred since I was in graduate school.