Psychological Tests at McGill

I still remember the first time I heard about psychology studies in my first month at McGill. I was in my BIOL 111 class and my friend was telling me that she did a study where she talked about chocolate for an hour and earned $10. All I kept thinking was, “What an easy way to earn money!” After that, my exposure to psychology studies have gradually increased ever year, especially since I am now majoring in Psychology and most psychology classes offer an extra 2% for participating in subject pool studies. Many of the psychological tests that I have learned about in class have been performed on me as a participant. I have to say, most of the psychology studies were boring but I have never found the studies where I was being tested boring. I thoroughly enjoyed being tested!!

Most recently, I participated in a study where I was working on parts of the WAIS for over 2 hours (it didn’t feel like 2 hours at all, more like 20 mins). I only realized that I was officially being tested on my cognitive abilities after I went to my PSYC 406 class where the lecturer talked about the WAIS. The section from the WAIS that I remember most clearly is the digit span. As the tester from the psych study increased the difficulty level of the digit span, I kept getting surprised at how easily I was able to repeat all the numbers back without any hesitation. When I got to the longest digit, I mixed up the last two digits but was able to correct my mistake almost instantaneously. With the backward digit span, I was unable to do as well but still got fairly far. I found this super surprising since whenever I am trying to type notes during a lecture, I always lose the sentence that I was trying to type halfway. Yet, with the digit span, I was able to correctly recall all the digits. During this study I also completed a subtest that is similar to the WMS logical memory. I was told two different stories and had to repeat them. I found them to be unexpectedly hard. When the tester read the stories and told me to repeat them, I discovered myself to be in a situation where I was unable to remember most of the details, even though I had just heard it. It was like my brain blanked and I was completely unable to recall many of the details.

Being a subject in psychology studies helped me gain further understanding on the materials I learned in class. All the different kinds of psychological tests taught were made personal and I could easily remember all those facts that I studied. Of course, part of that reason was mostly due to the fact I had so much fun being tested on!

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