End of Unit Activity 1

Seasonal cold snaps in the Costal Bend (and elsewhere) result in a high rate of cold-stunned sea turtles. In late December 2025, the Texas State Aquarium alone

. These efforts rely on conservation partners and volunteers to report sightings. New technologies can aid in this effort. Specifically, uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) that make use of semi-autonomous drones can quickly comb large areas and send information and images back to a central command center. This can produce a lot of data, so AI-powered computer aided detection (CAD) systems have been developed to help reduce the load. Making good use of these technologies, of course, also requires understanding the cognition of the people operating them.

For this End of Unit Activity, lets say you are a psychology researcher partnering with a non-profit that is building a conservation program to make finding and responding to cold-stunned sea turtles more effective. The program will use a small fleet of drones to capture images along the coast during cold stun events. The images will consist of photos of the shoreline and up to 2 km out in the bay. Because this will result in a lot of images, most of which will not contain a turtle, the captured images will be screened using a CAD system to filter images based on the likelihood of a turtle-like object is in the image. The CAD system flags images that have something that resembles a turtle but might produce a false positive (e.g., beach toys on the shore or other sea life out in the water). The flagged images are sent to a team of screeners who look for turtles in each image, and report sightings.

The software allows for adjustment in the threshold for how picky it is at labeling an object as a turtle. Decreasing the threshold decreases the number of false positives but also increases the number of misses. Increasing the threshold decreases the number of misses but increases the number of false positives (meaning more images for people to look through). The non-profit must balance the sensitivity and specificity of the CAD system against the availability of volunteers to screen the flagged images.

Your tasks is to propose a study that will help the non-profit make decisions about the implementation of this program. Assume there are other research teams helping with this project, so the scope of your study should be limited to a specific aspect of the program (e.g., threshold setting, screener training, screener selection, etc.). The board of the non-profit have set the following requirements for proposals:

1. A title page
2. A two-to-three-page introduction explaining the background and motivation for the study. The introduction should end with a paragraph that clearly states the research question and an explanation for why answering the question is important to the larger project.
3. A description of the method of the proposed study including (1) participants needed, (2) materials and equipment that will be used, (3) and a summary of the procedure.
4. A one-to-three-page discussion of the anticipated results. This can include the most anticipated outcome of the method and its implication for the program or two competing likely outcomes that have different potential impacts on the program.
5. A reference section (with no fewer than three peer-reviewed references, one of which is not part of the course content)

Use the above prompt to write an APA-style paper that meets the proposal guidelines. A successful proposal will use psychological theory to address one of the practical problems in the prompt.