Timing accuracy of Web experiments: A case study using the WebExp software package

Although Internet-based experiments are gaining in popularity, most studies rely on directly evaluating participants’ responses rather than response times. In the present article, we present two experiments that demonstrate the feasibility of collecting response latency data over the World-Wide Web using WebExp—a software package designed to run psychological experiments over the Internet. Experiment 1 uses WebExp to collect measurements for known time intervals (generated using keyboard repetition). The resulting measurements are found to be accurate across platforms and load conditions. In Experiment 2, we use WebExp to replicate a lab-based self-paced reading study from the psycholinguistic literature. The data of the Web-based replication correlate significantly with those of the original study and show the same main effects and interactions. We conclude that WebExp can be used to obtain reliable response time data, at least for the self-paced reading paradigm.     

Predicting future affective states: How ease of retrieval and faith in intuition moderate the impact of activated content

Prior research suggests that duration bias—the tendency to overestimate the duration of affective states—is due to individuals' inordinate focus on event‐related information. We propose that the impact of focusing on event‐related (vs. unrelated) content is moderated by the ease with which the information is brought to mind. In the present experiment, participants thought about a possible future negative event and made affective forecasts after retrieving either few or many aspects in their life that would be affected (or unaffected) by the event. Participants estimated longer duration of affective consequences when they retrieved event‐related rather than event‐unrelated information. However, this effect was restricted to conditions where the respective information was brought to mind easily. Importantly, results also revealed that individual differences in faith in intuition moderated the effect of manipulated ease of retrieval. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hebrew thoughts on immortality and resurrection

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

The role of elicited responding in behavioral contrast

An attempt was made to separate operant and elicited pecks occurring in multiple schedules of food reinforcement by moving the component stimuli to a second key, upon which pecks had no effect. The operant key stimulus was constant, regardless of the reinforcement schedule in effect. Experiments included two- and three-component multiple schedules and a comparison of the single-key and the two-key procedures. In general, conditions that typically produce positive contrast in single-key procedures reduced responding to the constant-stimulus key (induction) and increased responding to the component-stimulus key (contrast) in the two-key procedure. The results were interpreted as supporting the contention that two response classes, operant and elicited, are present in standard multiple schedules. In addition, elicited responses were strongly implicated in contrast phenomena.