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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. 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.

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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.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: The final publication is available at Springer via the link above.
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Reverse correlation, Bubbles, task engagement, child friendly, experimental outcomes
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 07 Jun 2017 09:53
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:33
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/18876

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