This is your brain on media
When you see a juicy hamburger in a TV commercial, does it make your mouth water? Does your heart beat faster when you're watching a horror movie? Just how does your body react when you see or hear certain images or sounds? It's a question advertisers have been researching for decades -- and one that the students in Robert Potter's Intensive Freshman Seminar (IFS) worked to understand during a three-week course leading up to their inaugural year at Indiana University Bloomington.
Photo by Aaron Bernstein
Adam Mirkin prepares for a class experiment in Robert Potter's Intensive Freshman Seminar, "This is Your Brain on Media: How TV, Computer Games, and Radio Capture Your Attention and Play With Your Emotions."
"This is Your Brain on Media: How TV, Computer Games, and Radio Capture Your Attention and Play With Your Emotions" -- one of more than 20 IFS options at IU in August 2009 -- gave incoming IU students the opportunity to apply advanced psychological research methods that they used to design and conduct their own experiments. Students measured variances in each other's heart rates, skin conductance (the electrical resistance of the skin) and facial electromyography (muscle activity generated by muscle fibers when they contract) while they viewed various media images.
Throughout the class, students kept a media-use diary, worked on lab exercises (some of the exercises included identifying how a particular image made them feel on scales ranging from "happy" to "not at all happy" or "scared" to "not at all scared") took periodic exams and finally, presented the results of their research endeavors.
Outside of their experiments and lab work, the class also took field trips to the Wells Library Information Commons; the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction; the IU Art Museum; the Lilly Library; the Radio-Television Center, which broadcasts programs on WFIU and WTIU; and the student station, WIUX-FM.
Photo by Aaron Bernstein
Potter and his students look at the results of Mirkin's experiment.
Potter, an IU associate professor of telecommunications who is spending the 2009-2010 school year on sabbatical in Australia, said he enjoys sharing his passion for media research.
Know to his students and colleagues alike as "The Audio Prof," Potter is director of the Institute for Communication Research. His research focuses on the cognitive processing of media messages with a particular focus on the impact of audio features on cognition and emotional response.
During the third and final week of class, Potter chatted about the course while he and some of the students used electrolyte gel to connect sensors to a classmate's face and arms. "This is essentially amplifying the electrical signals for the corrugator muscles, which are very small signals and rather deep in the skin," said Potter, as he tried to prevent the sensors from sliding off the student's face. "We're trying to get this to seep down to the muscle group. It's the same type of gel in these electrodes, so it's kind of making a bridge down to the muscle group and also helps the electrode adhere to the skin."
Potter said that the bulk of his research is funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) to help create more effective prevention campaigns. Next summer, he'll work for the USDA on a Cornell University grant to help develop food public safety announcements, and some of his research has been industry-funded by National Association of Broadcasters.
Andrew Pawlowski, of South Bend, came to IU for the IFS so he could get to campus early meet people before classes started. "Probably the best thing in the class is doing the experiments," he said. His classmate, Josh Beltz from Memphis, Tenn., said he liked the many walking tours of campus -- as well as getting to conduct experiments on his classmates, and then having the tables turned: "Last week, we were in charge of testing our other classmates, and this week they're going to test us," said Beltz.
