Recruiting Participants for the Poirot Study

The Poirot study in the Memory and Perception Lab investigates aspects of episodic memory. In this study, we ask participants to come into our lab to watch an episode of a TV show – Agatha Christie’s Poirot. If you have seen any episodes of this show, please inform your experimenter prior to scheduling.

After viewing the episode in lab and filling out some questionnaires, we send you home with a FitBit device to measure your physical activity and sleep patterns, all while going about your day as usual. [We also may ask you to log on to our website to replay some clips from the episode.] The next day, 24 hours after viewing the episode, we ask you to come back to the lab to tell us about your memory for the episode.

Two weeks later, we ask you to come back to the lab to watch a second episode of Poirot, go home with the FitBit again, [we also may ask you to replay clips from the second episode] and then come back to the lab another 24 hours later to tell us about what you recall from the episode.

To sum up, we ask you to come into the lab 4 times in total, to watch two episodes and later describe the episodes. For one set of episode viewing we ask you to come into the lab in the morning (9 AM viewing and 9 AM test), and for the other episode we’ll ask you to come into the lab in the evening (7 PM viewing and 7 PM test). In total, the study pays $100.

If you are interested, please contact poirothippocamera@gmail.com with your answers to the following questions:

  1. Have you seen any episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot? If so, which episodes? (If you can’t remember the specific episode, you can describe them briefly.)
  2. Are you within the 18-40 age range?
  3. Do you have normal-to-corrected vision?
  4. Have you been diagnosed with a neuropsychological disorder?