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 and Ewing, Louise ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5263-1267 (2018) 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. Behavior Research Methods, 50 (3). 1011–1019. ISSN 1554-351X

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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 boost the participant’s engagement and motivation for the task but results in significantly improved objective task performance and stronger statistical results.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	reverse correlation,bubbles,task engagement,child friendly,experimental outcomes
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	26 May 2017 05:06
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2022 02:42
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/63614
DOI:	10.3758/s13428-017-0922-6

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