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. and Cesana, Maria letizia and Farran, E. and Karmiloff-Smith, Annette and Ewing, Louise (2017) 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), pp. 1011-1019. ISSN 1554-3528.

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.

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