Software for generating psychological experiments

This review compares four software packages for generating and running psychological computer experiments. It aims to inform researchers' decisions about which software to choose for their lab. Four widely used general purpose commercial packages available for the Windows platform are considered: DirectRT, E-Prime, Inquisit, and SuperLab. An overview of each package is given, and the implementation of two test experiments is described. Packages are evaluated with regard to the amount of complexity reduction they provide for the task of programming an experiment and the variety of experimental designs they can accommodate.     

Effects of different packages on food product contagion: The moderating roles of mood states and product‐related information

Across two experiments conducted for this research, it is evident that different moderators do play a role in the influence of food product contagion effects. This research focuses on how mood states or product‐related information moderate contagion prime and package type. Existing studies indicate that unsealed packages can enhance the extent of the contagion effects more than sealed packages. Study 1 showed that happy people experienced stronger positive contagion effects than sad or neutral ones and that they also demonstrated stronger effects on unsealed packages compared with sealed packages. Conversely, sad people significantly enhanced the extent of negative contagion effects and experienced stronger effects on unsealed packages. Study 2, however, revealed that people receiving positive product‐related information experienced stronger positive contagion effects on unsealed packages, whereas people receiving negative product‐related information showed stronger negative contagion effects on unsealed packages. This is the first study to discuss the chosen moderators on the contagion effect. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Teaching preschool children to report suspicious packages to adults

Law enforcement agencies stress that public reporting of terror‐related crime is the predominant means for disrupting these actions. However, schools may be unprepared because the majority of the populace may not understand the threat of suspicious materials or what to do when they are found on school grounds. The purpose of this study was to systematically teach preschool children to identify and report suspicious packages across three experiments. In the first experiment, we used multiple exemplar training to teach children to identify the characteristics of safe and unsafe packages. In the second experiment, we taught participants to identify the locations where packages should be considered unsafe. Finally, in the third experiment, we used behavioral skills training to teach participants to avoid touching unsafe packages, leave the area where they were located, and report their discovery to an adult. Results suggest the participants quickly developed these skills. Implications for safety skills in young school children are discussed.     

A critical evaluation of software for experiment development in research and teaching

This paper compares several software packages that allow users to create new computer-run experiments, but do not require that users be able to program. Three dimensions are considered: package requirements, ease of learning, and power and flexibility.     

Community applications of instructional technology: teaching writers of instructional packages

A community education program, to develop a variety of performance competencies in large numbers of neighborhood residents, requires a technology for preparing learning units administerable by community members themselves. The effects of a writing manual, designed to teach nonprofessionals to prepare such instructional packages, were analyzed in two experiments. Experiment I employed a multiple-baseline design across three university student trainees. The results showed that appropriate program writing increased by 75% after completion of the manual. The results of Experiment II, with two low-income neighborhood residents serving as trainees, showed that packages produced by trained writers resulted in a greater increase in skill activities than sets of training stimuli produced by untrained writers.     

The use of an unpleasant sound as the unconditional stimulus in aversive Pavlovian conditioning experiments that involve children and adolescent participants

Ethical considerations can prohibit the use of traditional unconditional stimuli (USs), such as electric shocks or loud tones, when children or adolescents participate in aversive Pavlovian conditioning experiments. The present study evaluated whether an unpleasant sound provides a viable alternative. Fifteen boys and girls aged 13 to 17 years completed a differential Pavlovian conditioning procedure in which a conditional stimulus (CS) was followed by the sound of metal scraping on slate. Acquisition of conditioned responses was found in startle blink magnitude, expectancy judgments of the sound, and skin conductance responses. Extinction of conditioned responses was found in all measures when the CS was no longer followed by the unpleasant sound. Subjective ratings and skin conductance responses indicated that the sound was unpleasant because of its qualitative features, rather than its intensity. The results support the use of an unpleasant sound as a low-risk alternative to traditional USs in aversive Pavlovian conditioning experiments with children and adolescents.     

Aesthetic package design: A behavioral,neural, and psychological investigation

In four experiments, this research sheds light on aesthetic experiences by rigorously investigating behavioral, neural, and psychological properties of package design. We find that aesthetic packages significantly increase the reaction time of consumers' choice responses; that they are chosen over products with well-known brands in standardized packages, despite higher prices; and that they result in increased activation in the nucleus accumbens and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, according to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results suggest that reward value plays an important role in aesthetic product experiences. Further, a closer look at psychometric and neuroimaging data finds that a paper-and-pencil measure of affective product involvement correlates with aesthetic product experiences in the brain. Implications for future aesthetics research, package designers, and product managers are discussed.     

Effect of head movement on the localization of sounds in the equatorial plane

Five experiments examined the effect of head movement on the localization of sound sources in the equatorial plane. Under most conditions, head movement produces poorer localization for sound sources in the equatorial plane. Only one condition demonstrated an improvement in localization with head movement. The sound source was located toward the side of the head and the source duration was long enough to permit reorientation of the position of the head with re-spect to the sound source.     

An evaluation of statistical software for research and instruction

A variety of microcomputer statistics packages were evaluated. The packages were compared on a number of dimensions, including error handling, documentation, statistical capability, and accuracy. Results indicated that there are some very good packages available both for instruction and for analyzing research data. In general, the microcomputer packages were easier to learn and to use than were mainframe packages. Furthermore, output of mainframe packages was found to be less accurate than output of some of the microcomputer packages.     

Shrinkage of perceived tonal duration produced by extra sounds: effects of spectral density, temporal position, and transition direction

To investigate the mental mechanism that estimates the duration of sounds, the subjective duration of a tone was measured. In the first experiment a portion of the target sound was replaced with another sound. In the second and third experiments another sound either started or ended in the middle of the target sound. Ten or eleven undergraduates participated as listeners in each of the experiments. In the first experiment, effects of spectral spacing and those of temporal position of the replacing sound were tested. Compared with the intact case, the subjective duration of the replaced target shrunk, and the degree of shrinkage increased as the spectral spacing became wider. The temporal position of the replacing sound did not affect the degree of shrinkage. In the second experiment, effects produced by the start (ON) of the concurrent sound and those by the end (OFF) were compared. The ON case was more effective than the OFF case. In the third experiment, effects of the rise time and fall time of the concurrent sound were tested. A long rise and fall time reduced the difference between the ON and OFF cases. These results are discussed from two viewpoints, one assuming an interaction between the time markers, the other assuming continuous gate control in a neural-counting model for duration.     

Reverberant auditory environments: the effects of multiple echoes on distraction by ‘irrelevant’ speech

Two experiments examine the effect on an immediate recall test of simulating a reverberant auditory environment in which auditory distracters in the form of speech are played to the participants (the ‘irrelevant sound effect’). An echo‐intensive environment simulated by the addition of reverberation to the speech reduced the extent of ‘changes in state’ in the irrelevant speech stream by smoothing the profile of the waveform. In both experiments, the reverberant auditory environment produced significantly smaller irrelevant sound distraction effects than an echo‐free environment. Results are interpreted in terms of changing‐state hypothesis, which states that acoustic content of irrelevant sound, rather than phonology or semantics, determines the extent of the irrelevant sound effect (ISE). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of the sound of tapping for nonvisual judgment of gap crossability

The author investigated the possibility that nonvisual locomotion with a cane depends on the sound of the cane tapping. Blindfolded participants were asked to judge whether a gap in front of them could be crossed by walking. An acoustic analysis suggested that sound could, in theory, distinguish the gaps. Blindfolded sighted participants in Experiments 1 and 2 judged crossability under conditions in which only the sound of tapping was available and in which the sound was minimized; the third and fourth experiments included experienced cane users. Both inexperienced observers and experienced cane users were unaffected by sound reduction and were less able to discriminate gaps when using sound only than when using reduced sound. A fifth experiment indicated that active-passive differences were not responsible for these effects. Results indicate that sound is not necessary or sufficient for judging nonvisible crossability with a probe.     

Irrelevant Sound Disrupts Order Information in Free Recall as in Serial Recall

The claim that the sensitivity of free recall to disruption by irrelevant sound is a function of the extent to which rote rehearsal is employed as a mnemonic strategy was investigated in two experiments. The degree of disruption by irrelevant sound in terms of both item and order information was contrasted under serial and free recall instructions. Irrelevant sound was found to disrupt order and item information equally in serial and free recall tasks (Experiment 1). Contrary to previous reports, an effect of irrelevant sound was also demonstrated on free recall of particularly long lists, and the interaction between list length and retention interval in the irrelevant sound effect was examined (Experiment 2). Generally, the results support the view that irrelevant sound disrupts the use of order cues.     

Intermittent reinforcement of a continuous response

Konorski showed that when a go/no-go procedure was used, sound quality discriminations were rapidly acquired and sound location discriminations were slowly acquired. These findings have been interpreted as a general constraint on the acquisition of auditory discriminations (quality-location effect). However, experiments carried out within an evolutionary framework (Harrison, 1984) have shown that the rate of acquisition of sound location discriminations varies widely as a function of the inclusion or exclusion of naturalistic features. These data suggest that Konorski's findings were a function of the special conditions of the experiments. The first purpose of the present experiments was to assess whether rats showed the effects noted by Konorski when studied under similar conditions. The second purpose was to study the effect of manipulating two natural features (novelty and stimulus-response adjacency) to assess whether the acquisition rates of quality and location discriminations could be greatly modified or made approximately equal, or both. When a go/no-go procedure was used and the other conditions were similar to those of Konorski, rats acquired a quality discrimination but did not acquire a location discrimination. However, when the S+ or S- were presented through a closely adjacent speaker, the sound location discrimination was acquired as rapidly as the quality discrimination. Finally, preexposing the animal to either S+ or S- retarded the rate of or prevented the acquisition of the quality discrimination. The experiments showed that the quality-location effect was determined primarily by the conditions used in Konorski's experiments, and that the effect is not a general constraint on learning.     

Food for thought: the effect of counterfactual thinking on the use of nutrition information

In three experiments, we examine the efficacy of counterfactual thinking (CFT) as a strategy to enhance consumers' motivation to process and use nutrition information on food packages. In the first study, we test whether CFT leads to greater motivation to process nutrition label information in the process of forming product attitudes. We also test whether motivation mediates the relationship between CFT and the influence of the nutrition label in product evaluation. In a second study, we test the effect of upward versus downward CFT on motivation. We also examine whether nutrition information on food packages moderates the relationship between CFT and product attitudes. In a third study, we examined the duration of the motivational effect of CFT. Results from the three studies support the role of CFT as a mechanism that enhances consumers' motivation to elaborate on and use nutrition information to form product attitudes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Feature mismatch effects in auditory negative priming: interference as dependent on salient aspects of prior episodes

A handful of studies have revealed that withholding a response to a sound causes impaired responding to that sound when subsequently presented (Buchner & Steffens, 2001; Mondor, Leboe, & Leboe, 2005). In the present study, we investigated whether a switch in the location of a repeated sound might represent an additional source of this auditory negative priming effect. In all three of our experiments, participants performed a series of trials in which they withheld a response to a dichotic pair of prime sounds presented to each ear. A dichotic pair of probe sounds was then presented to each ear, and the participants were required to categorize one of them. Across these experiments, the participants were slower to categorize only repeated sounds that were presented in opposite locations.     

Express: A Web-based technology to support human and computational experimentation

Experimental cognitive psychology has been greatly assisted by the development of general computer-based experiment presentation packages. Typically, however, such packages provide little support for running participants on different computers. It is left to the experimenter to ensure that group sizes are balanced between conditions and to merge data gathered on different computers once the experiment is complete. Equivalent issues arise in the evaluation of parameterized computational models, where it is frequently necessary to test a model’s behavior over a range of parameter values (which amount to between-subjects factors) and where such testing can be speeded up significantly by the use of multiple processors. This article describes Express, a Web-based technology for coordinating “clients” (human participants or computational models) and collating client data. The technology provides an experiment design editor, client coordination facilities (e.g., automated randomized assignment of clients to groups so that group sizes are balanced), general data collation and tabulation facilities, a range of basic statistical functions (which are constrained by the specified experimental design), and facilities to export data to standard statistical packages (such as SPSS). We report case studies demonstrating the utility of Express in both human and computational experiments. Express may be freely downloaded from the Express Web site (http://express.psyc.bbk.ac.uk/).     

A small high-frequency headphone

The construction and performance of a small electrostatic sound transducer are discussed. The transducer has strong power output, from 2,000 Hz to 70,000 Hz, and is simple to fabricate. Applications include a semi-insertion headphone for human audiology experiments and a compact sound source that can be flush mounted against an animal’s auditory canal.     

When sound affects vision: effects of auditory grouping on visual motion perception

Two identical visual targets moving across each other can be perceived either to bounce off or to stream through each other. A brief sound at the moment the targets coincide biases perception toward bouncing. We found that this bounce-inducing effect was attenuated when other identical sounds (auditory flankers) were presented 300 ms before and after the simultaneous sound. The attenuation occurred only when the simultaneous sound and auditory flankers had similar acoustic characteristics and the simultaneous sound was not salient. These results suggest that there is an aspect of auditory-grouping (saliency-assigning) processes that is context-sensitive and can be utilized by the visual system for solving ambiguity. Furthermore, control experiments revealed that such auditory context did not affect the perceptual qualities of the simultaneous sound. Because the attenuation effect is not manifest in the perception of acoustic characteristics of individual sound elements, we conclude that it is a genuine cross-modal effect.