Students Attend Psychology Fair
The University of Nebraska at Kearney hosted a psychology fair on Tuesday, October 30, and Pierce High’s psychology teacher Mrs. Brenda Fleecs took eight students to attend. The students were Hailey Abler, Dylan Delka, Jade Dickey, Zane Gleason, Peter Halsey, Kage Heisinger, Dean Orwig, and Jayden Sporleder.
At the fair, students witnessed and took part in demonstrations by UNK students in such areas as conditioned responses, perceptual illusions, and distracted performance. The fair has been an annual or biennial project of UNK’s entire psychology department, and there were enough demonstrations to require two hours of attendance by the students.
Fleecs said her students were very active participants in the various demonstrations and that they recognized many of the terms and concepts they had studied in their psychology class at Pierce.
For dinner the group went to a stone oven pizza restaurant, which they reported to be excellent. Jayden Sporleder said that was the highlight of the trip for him.
Peter Halsey said that the experience was worth the drive, and he most enjoyed an experiment in which students looked at a spinning wheel and then looked up to see what seemed to be the face of the presenter spinning, too. Kage Heisinger enjoyed a “facing fear” experiment in which participants held snakes and spiders to overcome phobias. Kage said he hadn’t been afraid of the creatures; he just enjoyed holding them. And Jade Dickey most enjoyed the demonstration on 3-D vision: looking through glasses, closing one eye, seeing a flat scene and a scene with dimensions.
