The University of California at Santa Barbara is developing a facility for computer based laboratory instruction in experimental psychology. Each work station has ancillary hardware which enables it to be used in specialized experimental exercises. The primary courses improved by this project are in upper level laboratory courses in the area of psychology known as Human Information Processing. Research in Human Information Processing is concerned with how humans perceive, learn, remember, and think about information. The three laboratory courses have the same general structure. Students work together in small groups to conduct a series of psychological experiments. As the course progresses, students take progressively more responsibility for the design of their experiments. The course concludes with students conducting an extended experimental project of their own design. Each of the three courses is focusing on a separate content area: one on memory, learning, and reasoning, one on attention and performance, and one on perception and psychophysics. In addition to teaching general laboratory techniques, a goal of these courses is to introduce students to the use of computers in modern research and data analysis. The ability to use computers to organize and analyze information is a necessary skill for many of today's professional jobs; therefore, it is an important part of the teaching mission of a university to acquaint students with the techniques available on personal workstations. For students who go in science, these courses are teaching students how to use of computers for data acquisition and analysis.
