Subject Recruitment Bias: The Paid Volunteer Subject

1978 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Rush ◽  
James S. Phillips ◽  
Paul E. Panek

To assess the potential bias introduced by subject recruitment procedures, differences in perceptual style, personality, and performance on an auditory selective attention task were investigated for a sample of 47 female, volunteer research participants. Half of the subjects ( N = 24) had been recruited as unpaid volunteers while the others ( N = 23) received $2.50 per hour for their participation. Stepwise discriminant analysis indicated that unpaid volunteers tended to be significantly more interpersonal in orientation, were more field-dependent, and committed fewer omission errors on a selective attention task than subjects who had volunteered for pay. The findings were discussed in terms of the problems associated with generalizing from one sample to other samples and to the criterion population as a function of experimental boundary conditions.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Jane Holt ◽  
Leah Furbert ◽  
Emily Sweetingham

The current research sought to replicate and extend work suggesting that coloring can reduce anxiety, asking whether coloring can improve cognitive performance. In two experiments undergraduates (N = 47; N = 52) colored and participated in a control condition. Subjective and performance measures of mood and mindfulness were included: an implicit mood test (Experiment 1) and a selective attention task (Experiment 2) along with a divergent thinking test. In both experiments coloring significantly reduced anxiety and increased mindfulness compared with control and baseline scores. Following coloring participants scored significantly lower on implicit fear, than the control condition, and significantly higher on selective attention and original ideation. Coloring may not only reduce anxiety, but also improve mindful attention and creative cognition.


Author(s):  
Rena Bayramova ◽  
Enrico Toffalini ◽  
Mario Bonato ◽  
Massimo Grassi

Abstract Can cognitive load enhance concentration on task-relevant information and help filter out distractors? Most of the prior research in the area of selective attention has focused on visual attention or cross-modal distraction and has yielded controversial results. Here, we studied whether working memory load can facilitate selective attention when both target and distractor stimuli are auditory. We used a letter n-back task with four levels of working memory load and two levels of distraction: congruent and incongruent distractors. This combination of updating and inhibition tasks allowed us to manipulate working memory load within the selective attention task. Participants sat in front of three loudspeakers and were asked to attend to the letter presented from the central loudspeaker while ignoring that presented from the flanking ones (spoken by a different person), which could be the same letter as the central one (congruent) or a different (incongruent) letter. Their task was to respond whether or not the central letter matched the letter presented n (0, 1, 2, or 3) trials back. Distraction was measured in terms of the difference in reaction time and accuracy on trials with incongruent versus congruent flankers. We found reduced interference from incongruent flankers in 2- and 3-back conditions compared to 0- and 1-back conditions, whereby higher working memory load almost negated the effect of incongruent flankers. These results suggest that high load on verbal working memory can facilitate inhibition of distractors in the auditory domain rather than make it more difficult as sometimes claimed.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huriye Atilgan ◽  
Jennifer K. Bizley

AbstractThe ability to use temporal relationships between cross-modal cues facilitates perception and behavior. Previously we observed that temporally correlated changes in the size of a visual stimulus and the intensity in an auditory stimulus influenced the ability of listeners to perform an auditory selective attention task (Maddox et al., 2015). In this task participants detected timbral changes in a target sound while ignoring those in a simultaneously presented masker. When the visual stimulus was temporally coherent with the target sound, performance was significantly better than when it was temporally coherent with the masker sound, despite the visual stimulus conveying no task-relevant information. Here, we trained observers to detect audiovisual temporal coherence and asked whether this improved their ability to benefit from visual cues during the auditory selective attention task. We observed these listeners improved performance in the auditory selective attention task and changed the way in which they benefited from a visual stimulus: after training performance was better when the visual stimulus was temporally coherent with either the target or the masker stream, relative to the condition in which the visual stimulus was coherent with neither auditory stream. A second group which trained to discriminate modulation rate differences between temporally coherent audiovisual streams improved task performance, but did not change the way in which they used visual information. A control group did not change their performance between pretest and post-test. These results provide insights into how crossmodal experience may optimize multisensory integration.


NeuroImage ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. S72
Author(s):  
J.Ph. Lachaux ◽  
N. Tzourio ◽  
F.El Massioui ◽  
B. Mazoyer ◽  
B. Renault

1985 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 260-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Ann Laraway

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference between the auditory selective attention abilities of normal and cerebral-palsied individuals. Twenty-three cerebral-palsied and 23 normal subjects between the ages of 5 and 21 were asked to repeat a series of 30 items consisting of from 2 to 4 digits in the presence of intermittent white noise. Results of the study indicate that cerebral-palsied individuals perform significantly poorer than normal individuals when the stimulus is accompanied by noise. Noise was not a significant factor in the performance of the normal subjects regardless of age.


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