Abstract
Few would argue that the unique insights brought by studying the typical and atypical development of psychological processes are essential to building a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Often, however, the associated challenges of working with non-standard adult populations results in the more complex psychophysical paradigms being rejected as too complex. Recently we created a child- (and clinical group) friendly implementation of one such technique – the reverse-correlation Bubbles approach – and noted an associated performance boost in adult participants. Here, we compare the administration of three different versions of this participant-friendly task in the same adult participants to empirically confirm that introducing elements in the experiment with the sole purpose of improving the participant experience, not only boosts the participant’s engagement and motivation for the task but results in a significantly improved objective task performance and stronger statistical results.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1011-1019 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Behaviour Research Methods |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2018 |
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A “spoon full of sugar” helps the medicine go down : How a participant friendly version of a psychophysics task significantly improves task engagement, performance and data quality in a typical adult sample. / Smith, Marie L.; Cesana, M. Letizia; Farran, Emily K.; Karmiloff-Smith, Annette; Ewing, Louise.
In: Behaviour Research Methods, Vol. 50, No. 3, 01.06.2018, p. 1011-1019.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
TY - JOUR
T1 - A “spoon full of sugar” helps the medicine go down
T2 - How a participant friendly version of a psychophysics task significantly improves task engagement, performance and data quality in a typical adult sample
AU - Smith, Marie L.
AU - Cesana, M. Letizia
AU - Farran, Emily K.
AU - Karmiloff-Smith, Annette
AU - Ewing, Louise
PY - 2018/6/1
Y1 - 2018/6/1
N2 - Few would argue that the unique insights brought by studying the typical and atypical development of psychological processes are essential to building a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Often, however, the associated challenges of working with non-standard adult populations results in the more complex psychophysical paradigms being rejected as too complex. Recently we created a child- (and clinical group) friendly implementation of one such technique – the reverse-correlation Bubbles approach – and noted an associated performance boost in adult participants. Here, we compare the administration of three different versions of this participant-friendly task in the same adult participants to empirically confirm that introducing elements in the experiment with the sole purpose of improving the participant experience, not only boosts the participant’s engagement and motivation for the task but results in a significantly improved objective task performance and stronger statistical results.
AB - Few would argue that the unique insights brought by studying the typical and atypical development of psychological processes are essential to building a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Often, however, the associated challenges of working with non-standard adult populations results in the more complex psychophysical paradigms being rejected as too complex. Recently we created a child- (and clinical group) friendly implementation of one such technique – the reverse-correlation Bubbles approach – and noted an associated performance boost in adult participants. Here, we compare the administration of three different versions of this participant-friendly task in the same adult participants to empirically confirm that introducing elements in the experiment with the sole purpose of improving the participant experience, not only boosts the participant’s engagement and motivation for the task but results in a significantly improved objective task performance and stronger statistical results.
KW - Bubbles
KW - Child friendly
KW - Experimental outcomes
KW - Reverse correlation
KW - Task engagement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85021225140&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3758/s13428-017-0922-6
DO - 10.3758/s13428-017-0922-6
M3 - Article
VL - 50
SP - 1011
EP - 1019
JO - Behaviour Research Methods
JF - Behaviour Research Methods
SN - 1554-351X
IS - 3
ER -