Questions tagged [experimental-psychology]
For questions about the application of specific experimental methods to study psychology.
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How do psychologists measure malicious behaviour?
How do psychologists measure malicious behaviour in humans? Is there a definitive definition of what constitutes malicious behaviour? Are there varying scales of malicious behaviour? Is it possible do ...
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Are all personalities divisive?
Most people like the smell of oranges. You might say that the distribution of reactions to the smell of oranges leans to the right.
Most people dislike the smell of sewage. You might say that the ...
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32 views
How many moving objects can a person count (on average)?
I wonder if experiments in perceptual or cognitive psychology have been performed following these considerations:
Standard experiment: Present small numbers of simple items to a test subject, for the ...
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1answer
13 views
What speaker is commonly used for low-latency audio stimulation
We need to purchase a new speaker for audio ERP study, so the sound should be played in lowest possible latency with lowest possible jitter. I have seen quite a few suggestion on the OS/driver/sound ...
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26 views
How to encourage people to experiment/try new things?
In a New York Times op-ed, Sendhil Mullainathan (professor of economics at Harvard) laments that it is difficult to get people to try new things or experiment. He gives himself as an example, saying ...
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1answer
33 views
Is there medical term for depression?
I have heard of many kind of depresssions. Depression is nothing but not letting our feelings outspoken . If we dont why it is said that the feelings stay inside and affect. Is it a solid particle ...
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1answer
17 views
When did the old term experimental reagent become experimental subject?
I've read a paper on an experiment called "The Feeling of Being Stared at", which investigates a concept which on Wikipedia is called the psychic staring effect. It was first investigated by ...
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1answer
27 views
How can two-way dependencies in factorial designs be interpreted?
Scenario: Given there are results from two factorial experiments that show a two-way dependency between two variables A and B.
Details: In the first experiment A is the independent variable with two ...
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1answer
41 views
What is an empirical proof that two concepts are not independent/orthogonal?
Given there are two psychological concepts A and B that are considered to be independent/orthogonal.
Would the following empirical results proof the opposite? If not why?
In the first experiment A ...
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1answer
118 views
Finding largest level of imperceptible noise in an image
Suppose that we want to find the "largest level" of a random noise that can safely be added to an image such that the resultant noisy image cannot be distinguishable from the original noise-free image....
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2answers
60 views
how to statistically analyse accuracy data (psycholinguistics)
My experiment is a naming task, in which participants name pictures and their vocal responses are recorded and the onset of vocalization. The data I am dealing with are reaction times in ms and ...
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1answer
73 views
What pro- or anti-environmental behaviors are feasible to measure objectively rather than with self-report?
One of the central challenges in understanding pro-environmental behavior is measurement. Currently, most researchers (including myself) lean on self-report of behavior.
I'm looking for a brainstorm. ...
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1answer
54 views
How to use QUEST in a discrimination task
Similar to the question "How to use a QUEST staircase in 2-AFC”. I also have a question about using QUEST. In fact, I too tried to find an answer in
Psychophysics: A Practical Introduction by Kingdom ...
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1answer
44 views
Does psychology lose it's validity when the subject is versed in psychology?
Quite often, I find myself conforming to typical psychological principals, and exhibiting predictable behavior based on external stimuli. However, upon better research of the psychology behind past ...
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What would be areas of ethical or safety concerns with a smartphone app interacting with people sleeping?
The BBC News article Hi-tech dreamcatcher defeats sleep amnesia mentions a recent talk by Adam Haar Horowitz and then describes some limited tests of an apparatus called Dormio at the MIT media lab, ...
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1answer
61 views
Uses of the Brief Anxiety Scale
I am currently completing my undergraduate research thesis on self-affirmations measured with anxiety. I am trying to see if the self-affirmation task reduces anxiety after. I found the Brief Anxiety ...
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1answer
33 views
Cognition of people born by C-section vs born ordinarily?
Has there been any research comparing the cognition of people born via C-section to people born vaginally?
During a vaginal birth, the baby's head is pressured and deforms somewhat in order to make ...
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1answer
39 views
Which experimental design is this? Factorial vs within groups
I have two independent variables (age and gender) and one dependent variable (the results of a questionnaire using a Likert scale).
I'm trying to see whether age and/or gender have an effect on the ...
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2answers
72 views
Reason for Inter-stimulus-Interval in psychology studies
In many of the studies that I have read or participated in, I have seen that they show a blank screen between two stimuli. For example, in a study by Cohen et al. (2017), a training paradigm was used ...
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1answer
57 views
Experiments demonstrating irreligious people spontaneously developing superstitious rituals?
I saw a video in which four adults were led into a room with a digital counter on the wall (see below), and a collection of random objects on the floor: small boxes, hand tools, stuffed animals, ...
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1answer
120 views
In general, how does one resolve two competing theories in Psychology?
In looking at a post on twitter from a somewhat well-known psychologist Tal Yarkoni, he references a paper which lists multiple sets of competing theories in Psychology that have not been resolved.
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1answer
39 views
Name of sound-induced-hunger condition
When I was a student I used to notice that towards supper time, whenever I would go from my quiet study space to a place where people were talking, it people started to tell in my quiet space, i would ...
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1answer
56 views
What is a “norming experiment”?
I am a non-psychologist reading some papers from psychology. I keep seeing the term "norming experiment" (e.g. "Normative Representation of Objects: Evidence for an Ecological Bias in Object ...
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1answer
35 views
Is it recommendable to put participants in different conditions across trials?
In a pilot study we want to give participants 3 different problems. Those come in two versions, one (supposedly) easier than the other. Participants will randomly be assigned one version of the ...
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3answers
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Should I look at the data of an experiment before the dataset is complete?
For a research internship I am running psychological experiments online. As it takes a while until the experiment is done (meaning that enough people participated, so that a sufficient sample size is ...
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Quasi-experiment: If I change some procedures from my pilot experiment, can I still compare post-intervention results to the pilot results?
I am running a quasi-experiment with English proficiency as a factor (native speakers=9, ESL speakers=10)
I just completed a pilot and fully plan to conduct the intervention as closely to the pilot's ...
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0answers
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Is there research that estimates when people think something supposedly random is rigged?
Let’s say you flip a coin three thousand times. If it comes up heads two thousand times, I think it’s safe to say that people will assume this is a rigged coin in spite of the fact that each outcome ...
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saccadic countermanding task
The saccadic countermanding task is used to measure response inhibition (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698999000115).
It is basically the stop-signal task that makes use of ...
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2answers
299 views
How does this experiment prove a causal relation between coherence and good feelings?
I'm reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and I came across the following text:
The Remote Association Test has more to tell us about the link between cognitive ease and positive ...
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0answers
180 views
How to prevent falling for Jingle-Jangle fallacies?
What are some ways to avoid the Jingle-Jangle fallacies when it comes to choosing a form of measurement in psychology research?
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49 views
Shipbuilding experiment about leader selection
I heard about an international research that was conducted more than 25 years ago. The following was the experiment:
25 teams, eight members per team, each team member with the same nationality had ...
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2answers
226 views
Platforms to make online experiments with counterbalancing
There are a number of different interfaces to make an place experiments online, e.g. in questions Software for online psychological experiments that don't require users to download anything or ...
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1answer
116 views
Long term effects of a high self monitor who voluntarily chooses a contradictory self-presentation
Are there any cases or studies of a high self monitor who intuitively chooses to act "by impulse" in order to reform said impulse?
In other words when the HSM ...
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0answers
54 views
Innateness of perceiving music as happy or sad
From John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 2, chapter 9:
I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious
promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy ...
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2answers
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What are the benefits of giving feedback to subjects during a discrimination task?
Context
I am planning an experiment where the subjects would need to determine the language of the stimulus after listening to it once, given two alternatives, L1 or L2.
In total I have 500 trials ...
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1answer
72 views
What is the consequences to be a person who works in theory of science?
this question rises into my head this day. First I read the comment by @mikeazo he says
Do you learn best by reading or doing? That will make a difference.
Also, today I had a class in ...
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0answers
30 views
Is anyone aware of any cognitive models that appraises interior design preferences?
The goal is to evaluate someone's interior design preference based on some text/image based questions. Can the personality and aesthetic profile extracted from the answers be used as inputs for a ...
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Share of happy marriages [closed]
I have googled quite alot to find any scientific statistics on any estimates of what share of all marriages consider themselves successfull. I understand that happiness is hard to measure, but is ...
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1answer
298 views
In the digit span test, why do some strategies work and others don't?
I got a free copy of PEBL, psych experiment software, which includes a couple of standard working memory tests.
When I perform the digit span working memory test, I can repeat the numbers as they ...
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1answer
59 views
Are chatbots based on deceased loved ones healthy? [closed]
I recently read an article about a journalist who created a chatbot to ensure that a conversational entity with elements of his dying father's personality would exist even after his father--terminally ...
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0answers
41 views
How much evidence is needed to support a claim? [closed]
Let's say that I hypothesised that if I behave in a certain way (X) then the people I interact with will respond with behaviour (Y). How much evidence do I need to make such claim ?
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What are common parameters for the Eriksen flanker task? [closed]
I'm looking to create a flanker task for an upcoming experiment. I'm wondering if there are any papers/websites that outline what the "standard" flanker task contains?
Specifically, I'm trying to ...
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3answers
830 views
How to use a QUEST staircase in 2-AFC?
Firstly, I need to declare that I am not psychologyst, however I am currently working on visual recognition research. To be precise, I working on face recognition deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorder. ...
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1answer
46 views
What variables allow one to empirically and scientifically quantify trends for learning curves?
Specifically, I am trying to quantify trends in learning for certain mediums of audio-visual communication, and what I've gathered so far suggests that there are 4 distinguishable types, being linear, ...
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2answers
129 views
What is the reason behind terrorist attacks?
From psychology point of view, what is the reason behind terrorist attacks?
What is the motivation for the leaders of terrorists?
What is the motivation for the person who performs terrorist attacks?
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1answer
65 views
Understanding a negative correlation between Pc and signal strength
When I present two signals in paired comparison and ask the respondent to select the stronger signal in the pair, I find that it is the signal strength of the second signal that more so determines ...
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0answers
54 views
Is psychology equivalent to physics of the 1900s? [closed]
I read that psychological inquiry can be analogized to the work done by physicists long ago before modern sophisticated theories, such as electromagnetism. According to the argument, psychologists ...
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1answer
44 views
How to record mouse-pointer fixations? [closed]
I'm planning an experiment in which participants will respond to a stimulus by using a mouse to click somewhere on a computer screen. I'm interested in analyzing the strategies participants use to ...
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1answer
1k views
How do you decide how many trials to have in an experiment? [duplicate]
I'm currently designing an experiment with several conditions - how do I decide how many repetitions / stimuli within each condition?
I know that I can justify sample size with an a priori power ...
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1answer
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Why are the ERP amplitudes recorded and analyzed from different software so different in voltage?
Here are the two ERPs from the same study design, though different subjects. The largest amplitude in the 1st one goes up to 25 uv, while only goes up to 6 in the 2nd figure.
Differences: The 1st ...
