In class, we are about to investigate the major stimulant class of psychoactive drugs. One of the licit drugs in this class of psychoactive substances is caffeine. In this experiment, your mission is to find out what effect, if any, caffeine has on steadiness and reaction time. To determine this, you will use the very old psychophysical measure of steadiness, translated into a modern child's game: “Operation.”

In this experiment, you will each get to "play Operation," although a little differently than you might have as a child. In our version of this game, each person will get two turns to try to remove all of the pieces in order, in one sitting. The data that you will record will include: the time it takes each person to remove each piece, the difficulty number of the pieces on which they make errors, the number of tries until the piece is removed or until they give up, and the total number of successful removals (that is, removals on the first try).

Half of the class will drink decaffeinated cola, and half will drink cola with caffeine in it. Then, in teams of 3, all of us will play the game “Operation.” One at a time, each team member should try to remove all of the pieces in the game. If the gameboard buzzes at any time during the attempted removal, that will be considered an error and the player must start over. While one person is attempting to remove the pieces, another team member should time how long it takes to remove each piece. The 3rd team member should record number of “buzzes” and the total number of tries it takes to remove each piece without errors.

When all 3 team members have completed a round of the game, come to the front of the room and enter your data on the class spreadsheet on the computer. I will post the compiled data on the course “Blackboard” site for you to use in writing up the results of this investigation.

When you get the compiled data for the entire class, use it to write up a short research paper on our investigation. The purpose of your study is to compare the steadiness and reaction time scores of students who consumed caffeine with those who did not, so we can get a feeling for how (if at all) caffeine affects these behaviors.

Your write-up should follow the format of a standard research paper. That is, it should begin with a title page that includes the authors’ last names and affiliations, an abstract, an introduction, a method section, a results section, a discussion section, and a reference section if appropriate. If it has been a while since you have written this kind of paper, you may wish to consult some on-line versions I have posted for another class, Comparative Animal Behavior. To find these documents, go here. Use the same format that is described here. A sample research paper can be found at this link.

You may wish to include some charts or graphs in your final paper.