In The Experiment, Students Conditioned Planaria To Either

In the experiment, students conditioned planaria to either avoid or approach light. The process included a learning phase and a memory phase for both experiments 1 and 2. The planaria were placed in a plywood track to be trained. Conditioning for approach light was done by shining the light on the planaria for 30 seconds and then turning the light off. When the light was off, air was blown at the heads of the planaria so that they turned around. This process was repeated and trials were recorded for when the planaria turned on their own without the puff of air. The same process was done for conditioning the planaria to avoid light, except the planaria received puffs of air to the head with the light shining on them. The second portion†¦show more content†¦The subjects were either given a placebo or a moderate dose of caffeine; three different memory tasks were then conducted. Though the results showed no evidence that caffeine had an effect on memory, it showed that pe rformance levels were better when subjects had been exposed to caffeine (Kelemen Creeley, 2001). With the information for previous experiments, the basis of this experiment was formatted. The current study, like the previous, also looks at the effect that exposure to caffeine can have on the test subject’s performance. The whole experiment is divided into two parts, experiment 1 and experiment 2. The first portion of the experiment looks at the difference between training planaria to turn around in two different conditions. The planaria were either trained to approach the light or avoid the light by using the positive punishment of blowing puffs of air at the heads of the planaria until they turned around. The second portion of the experiment used the same training conditions as the first portion but looked at the effect the exposure to caffeine had on the planaria, specifically, the number of trials that were conducted to get the planaria to turn around on their own. T he experiment was then conducted after forming two hypotheses, one for experiment 1 and one for experiment 2, to use as a guideline. Based on the current knowledge about planaria and their natural habitat, it can be hypothesized for experiment 1 that it will require fewer trials for