Inferential tests
The full results of the inferential tests mentioned in the poster.
Behavioural Reaction time A two-way ANOVA was conducted to examine the effects of age group, block, and their interaction on the dependent variable, reaction time. The results showed a significant main effect of age group, F(1, 32) = 35.73, p < .001, η² = .487, with a large effect size. The main effect of block was not significant, F(1, 32) = 1.
Method
The detailed methods section.
Method Participants Sample size A sample size calculation was run based on the largest anticipated test with an estimable effect size: a two-way Mixed ANOVA on the effect of the between subject variable age (young vs old) and within subject variable block (first vs last) on omission error. We expected the power (1 – β) of 0.80, α = 0.05 and a medium effect size of Cohen’s f 0.
Exploration
Details of further exploratory tests.
Visual field test Participants’ visual abilities were assessed using a simplified visual field test. One young participant experienced a technical fault which invalidated their data and lead to exclusion from the visual field test analysis.
Both young (mean = 98.13 %, SD = 3.27 %, range = 87.50% – 100%) and older participants (mean = 96.22%, SD = 4.49%, range = 81.25% - 100%) showed high accuracy in detecting the targets.
Preregistration
The preregistration of this experiment can be found here: preregistration.
VAS
A pre-registered confirmation of task-specificity of subjective state fatigue change is summarised here.
Background Compliance has been shown to affect internal mental states (Yao & Neal, 2008) which, as opposed to traits, show dynamic development. In fact, different probes have been used previously to reliably infer about such constructs, i.e., mind-wandering during a Sustained Attention to Response Task (Robertson, 1997, Weinstein, 2018, Jackson & Balota, 2012). So, demand characteristics may interfere with self-report and thus cloud and inflate findings relying on subjective state measures (Vinski & Watter, 2012).
Inverse efficiency
Background The SART task has been previously implemented in a follow-up experiment comparing the influence of online or offline environments on task performance. A custom Jspsych script (de Leeuw et al., 2021) was used to create the online equivalent of the laboratory version of the task in a within-subject control study (young adult students, n=14, mean 22.36 years ± 1.78). In the original experiment, each participant conducted the experiment twice – once “offline” in the laboratory and once “online” remotely, with the order counterbalanced – to discern effects of environment.
Pilot
Preceeding pre-registration, a pilot was conducted to finetune the original adaptation of the SART for the purposes of this research:
Method Piloting for the experiment was carried out on 4 younger participants (2 F). They carried out a preliminary version of the SART task, consisting of 160 go and 40 nogo trials, 13 minute length in total. Most participants also had baseline neural signal recorded and eyes closed recorded.
Analysis The data was epoched to -1500ms – 1500ms, resampled to 1000Hz in one case and filtered 1-40Hz with eye blinks removed as the first component of an ICA.