Title |
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
|
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Published in |
Behavior Research Methods, June 2017
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DOI | 10.3758/s13428-017-0922-6 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Marie L. Smith, M. Letizia Cesana, Emily K. Farran, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Louise Ewing |
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. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United Kingdom | 13 | 59% |
Switzerland | 1 | 5% |
Czechia | 1 | 5% |
United States | 1 | 5% |
France | 1 | 5% |
Unknown | 5 | 23% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Members of the public | 13 | 59% |
Scientists | 6 | 27% |
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) | 3 | 14% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Unknown | 31 | 100% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Student > Ph. D. Student | 7 | 23% |
Student > Master | 5 | 16% |
Lecturer | 4 | 13% |
Professor | 4 | 13% |
Researcher | 3 | 10% |
Other | 3 | 10% |
Unknown | 5 | 16% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Psychology | 13 | 42% |
Medicine and Dentistry | 2 | 6% |
Neuroscience | 2 | 6% |
Economics, Econometrics and Finance | 1 | 3% |
Nursing and Health Professions | 1 | 3% |
Other | 5 | 16% |
Unknown | 7 | 23% |