Memories of a Winning Student Video- And Suggestions for How You Could Win, Too
Posted October 2, 2014
By Eureka Foong – Winner of the 2104 Noba Student Video Award
@Eurekafoong
This summer, I had the ultimate internship experience for any psychology student -- working at the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. Even though the APA works to bring psychological research to legislators and the mass media, many people still have trouble seeing its value. “The mind cannot possibly study itself,” echoes a recent article from the parody news outlet The Onion. But people often miss that psychologists have uncovered mechanisms of thought that are not just “common sense.” One of the greatest examples of this is our research on human memory and the fact that memory does not act like a camera.
In January 2014, when I heard Noba was offering awards for videos on memory, I thought this would be a great way to dispel some “common sense” myths about memory. After much deliberation (and a coin toss), I decided to make a video on the “misinformation effect” . In a nutshell, misinformation happens when, in the process of reconstructing a memory, we are fed incorrect information that tampers with our memory of an event. My first order of business was to come up with a theme for the video. “Memory is constructive… constructive… like a sandwich!” were the exact words I used to describe my first idea to my friend, who responded with very little enthusiasm. Later that week, as I sat down to take a photo of my delicious dinner (typical Asian), it clicked. I could talk about the misinformation effect by showing how different memory is from the pictures we take every day.
As a one-woman production team, I wanted my script to be easy enough for high school students to understand, yet still be informative to a psychology major in college. I scoured YouTube for ideas and read several studies on the misinformation effect. To add something different, I ended the script by talking about how a misinformed eyewitness can send an innocent person to jail. Though my storyboard was complete, I only began working on the video a few weeks before the deadline. I filmed my friends taking photos of their dinner, looked for stock graphics and designed some images on Adobe Illustrator. I assembled everything – backdrops, objects and animations – in Microsoft PowerPoint and imported the video to Windows Movie Maker, where I added voiceovers and sound effects. From the time I began working on my computer, it took two and a half weeks to finalize the project.
If you’re thinking about taking part in the next Student Video Award, here are a few things to keep in mind. Choose a topic early and learn as much as you can about it, even beyond the online Noba modules. See what others have done with the same topic on YouTube. When writing your script, explain concepts that might be new to your audience. Provide fun facts and tie your topic to another area that might be outside of psychology. And most importantly, enjoy sharing the fruits of your labor when you’re done – you’ve made it!
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Eureka’s video on the Misinformation Effect won the top Award in 2014. She received $6,000 and her video is now included in the Noba modules “Memory (Encoding, Storage, Retrieval)”, and “Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Biases”. You can see it and the other 2014 Award winners here - http://nobaproject.com/student-video-award/winners
The 2015 Student Video Award is all about “Social Influence”. Students can pick any topic from either of two modules –
1) Persuasion: So Easily Fooled (http://nobaproject.com/chapters/persuasion-so-easily-fooled)
or
2) Conformity and Obedience (http://nobaproject.com/chapters/conformity-and-obedience).
Find a creative and memorable way to capture your topic in a short (3-minutes or less) video and you could win a share of $10,000. To see all the details and entry form visit the Awards page on the Noba website - http://nobaproject.com/student-video-award
