# Tag Info

7

I think it's a basic concept of experimental design that you have control groups. So for example, if you want to study the effect of X (e.g., a drug) on Y (e.g., performance), you could manipulate X (e.g., give half the drug and the other half no drug) and randomly assign the participants to either group. Random assignment is a strategy for making the groups ...

6

The study design sounds pretty good. Some of the good things you are proposing: Using a repeated measures design will give you more statistical power than a between subjects design, which is particularly useful when your sample size is small. Randomising or counterbalancing for order should mostly control for order effects. Double blind will focus the ...

6

Does the locking refer to the initiation of the measurement with starting cue being being the presentation of stimulus or the response of the subject? More or less, yes. When measuring brain activity, you usually make a long, continuous recording during which you expose your study participants to a task over and over again. There's a lot of noise ...

6

Antoine Tremblay has just released an advanced analysis toolbox: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12299/abstract It's missing about half the features on your list, although fundamentally, spectral density is a simple task and LORETA is a stand-alone package anyways (although similar approaches, e.g. general CSD estimation, are implemented in ...

5

How many trials do you have per condition? With a small number of trials in the deviant condition, and a small number of participants, these things can happen. The ISI would not cause this per se, however, have you considered looking at effects of the previous trial? You can analyze the baseline intervals as a function of what type the previous trial was, ...

5

First off, what button-box you use is going to be influenced by what software you're using to run the experiment, so ideally you should specify that. The PST serial response box is probably the industry standard, and is what we have in my lab, although a lot of that is probably down to it coming from the makers of EPrime. EPrime doesn't work on OSX ...

4

The number of samples that are necessary for a good parameter estimation does indeed depend on the estimation method. I am not aware of a simple rule of thumb to determine an optimal sample size, but there has been a lot of literature on this topic. A paper that might be a good starting point for a literature search is Van Zandt T. (2000) How to fit a ...

4

Disclaimer: I'm not generally doing experiments where reaction time is the primary DV. But I thought I'd look at this issue and explored RTs from a neuroimaging dataset, and I think the findings are relevant to the question. I think without further qualification, this question doesn't have an answer. Here I've plotted the estimation of reaction time/RT over ...

4

What you are actually asking about is the debate surrounding the question: Can psychological quantities be measured? Up until about 1800 psychological questions where discussed by philosophers. A separate psychological discipline did not yet exist. Answers to questions relating to perception, emotion and cognition where attempted on the basis of religious ...

4

If n != m then it will not home in on the 50 % threshold. In these simple N-up/N-down staircases, you can modify either the stepsize (as you proposed) or the number of successes/failures to act as a criterion for upgrade/downgrade. A comprehensive introduction to these staircases and the effect of changing these properties can be found in this paper. The 80 ...

3

There are a range of "adjective checklists" that have been developed to assess affective states, personality traits, or characteristics of individuals. Two of the most widely cited measures are the Multiple Affective Adjective Check List (MAACL) and the Multiple Affective Adjective Checklist-Revised (MAACL-R) (Zuckerman & Lubin, 1965; Zuckerman & ...

3

As mentioned in the other comments, ANOVA is problematic when mixing types of predictor variables. (Generalized) mixed effects models are gaining popularity these days and actually provide a very convenient way for modelling such things. A paper demonstrating the efficacy of this approach as well as giving a tutorial-like introduction is: Davidson, D. J. ...

3

I'm still not clear on what is your question. You ask whether psychology and medicine differ in some aspect of their methodological approach. Experiments are typically analysed using statistics to test hypotheses. So those things all go together. Psychology and medicine both perform controlled experiments and observational studies. They both perform ...

3

You may want to have a look at our 40 questions to date that use the statistics tag. These may demonstrate the complexity of our applications in statistics. Wikipedia also has an entire psychological statistics page that seems intended to index other pages on specific applications. Psychological experiments commonly test null hypotheses (e.g., $H_0$: the ...

3

For an open source JavaScript/HTML/CSS solution, check out jsPsych: http://www.jspsych.org. It can be used for reaction time measurement and interactive designs. An article describing the library was recently published in Behavior Research Methods. de Leeuw, J. R. (2014). jsPsych: A JavaScript library for creating behavioral experiments in a Web browser. ...

3

See this question on comparing scales with different response scales. In short, you have to do it with care. A good option for ensuring comparability is to get a sample of participants to provide responses on both response scales in order to see how they relate. This could then be used to create a conversion scale. More generally, there is a large debate ...

3

I'm a student of psychology. Every week we read several papers and discuss them in class. I'm in my seventh semester now, but as yet I have not read a single psychological journal article that we did not find fault with! Often the basic premises are at best tentative. Very often the statistical methodology used is not actually applicable to the case at hand. ...

3

It's a little unclear what you're asking. In general, psychologists try to build models that are parsimonious; this often means only introducing new parameters (particularly free parameters) into a model when they are absolutely necessary. You are right that with a sufficient number of free parameters, one can build a model that fits the data perfectly. But ...

3

This is a very general answer to your question. And let me say upfront that I don't know about any measurement instruments for pleasure. However, I would like to emphasize that pleasure, just as about any psychological phenomenon, has to be considered a latent construct. What this means is that it cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly and ...

3

More comprehensive ones than the abovementioned memory test include the Miller Forensic Assessement of Symptoms and the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms. These assess a wide variety of psychiatric symptoms and are supposedly very hard to fake.

3

Obviously, this question is highly under-specified. The sample size you need depends a lot on the aims of your analysis. In general, when thinking about sample size requirements, you need to think about power analysis and desired precision of estimation. This in turn requires you to think about your research question and expectations about results (e.g., ...

2

I haven't heard Fineman's speech, but from your description it seem that the problem he is getting at is that just because a certain finding has been made in one experiment, it is not a universal truth. It is quite possible that, when you try to replicate the findings, you will not be able to obtain them again. Jeromy already said something along these lines ...

2

There's a new program called "Paradigm" that has direct support for typed responses. It will measure the input speed, time to first key press and record the typed response. It's very easy to use and has a number of other great features. Check it out: Paradigm http://www.paradigmexperiments.com

2

I just wrote three big comments on @JeromyAnglim's answer, but I'm opting to move them all to this answer instead. This isn't an attempt to answer the OP completely, but hopefully they'll be of some use for part of the question. From a mainly statistical and psychometric standpoint, I've heard (from an expert whose opinion I could mention confidently in a ...

2

It's often referred to as "doll therapy" or "play therapy" and applies to adults as much as it does to children. For example, this new product, the "Inner Critic Doll" enables adults to hold a physical manifestation of their inner critic and start a dialogue with it. It has a zipper mouth which can be zipped shut to physically silence this inner voice. The ...

2

Adding to Jeromy's answer, the answer to your question would depend on what you want to study. If you study normal behavior, common to all people, you assign your participants randomly to the experimental and control group. The experimental group receives the factor you want to study (e.g. watches some advertising), while the control group does not, and ...

2

www.cognitive-innovations.com just released an iPad based cognitive assessment. Looks pretty comprehensive.

2

Without knowing exactly what the factor you are interested in is, it is hard to predict how feasible it would be to manipulate it. For example, is it possible to make two videos of the speaker, one with the factor, and one without, with nothing else changing? My guess is that you probably can't do this, so I'm going to focus on how you might be able to run ...

2

There is a program called Paradigm that allows you to build millisecond-accurate neurocognitive experiments for iOS devices. The experiment builder is like E-Prime but easier to use. The app is available in the app store. You upload your experiments to a Dropbox and then log in to access them through the app. It's pretty flexible. I've used it to build ...

2

I have used ethnography for similar purposes several times. Structuring the interviews so that you are an apprentice and your subject plays the role of a master artisan works well. The book, "Contextual Design" by Beyer and Holtzblatt provides several modeling techniques for expressing the information in some ways that add significantly to essay. ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible