QRTEngine: An easy solution for running online reaction time experiments using Qualtrics

Performing online behavioral research is gaining increased popularity among researchers in psychological and cognitive science. However, the currently available methods for conducting online reaction time experiments are often complicated and typically require advanced technical skills. In this article, we introduce the Qualtrics Reaction Time Engine (QRTEngine), an open-source JavaScript engine that can be embedded in the online survey development environment Qualtrics. The QRTEngine can be used to easily develop browser-based online reaction time experiments with accurate timing within current browser capabilities, and it requires only minimal programming skills. After introducing the QRTEngine, we briefly discuss how to create and distribute a Stroop task. Next, we describe a study in which we investigated the timing accuracy of the engine under different processor loads using external chronometry. Finally, we show that the QRTEngine can be used to reproduce classic behavioral effects in three reaction time paradigms: a Stroop task, an attentional blink task, and a masked-priming task. These findings demonstrate that QRTEngine can be used as a tool for conducting online behavioral research even when this requires accurate stimulus presentation times

Promises and pitfalls of Web-based experimentation in the advance of replicable psychological science. A reply to Plant (2015)

In a recent letter, Plant (2015) reminded us that proper calibration of our laboratory experiments is important for the progress of psychological science. Therefore, carefully controlled laboratory studies are argued to be preferred over Web-based experimentation, in which timing is usually more imprecise. Here we argue that there are many situations in which the timing of Web-based experimentation is acceptable and that online experimentation provides a very useful and promising complementary toolbox to available lab-based approaches. We discuss examples in which stimulus calibration or calibration against response criteria is necessary and situations in which this is not critical. We also discuss how online labor markets, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, allow researchers to acquire data in more diverse populations and to test theories along more psychological dimensions. Recent methodological advances that have produced more accurate browser-based stimulus presentation are also discussed. In our view, online experimentation is one of the most promising avenues to advance replicable psychological science in the near future.Action Contro

Editorial: Adaptive Hot Cognition: How Emotion Drives Information Processing and Cognition Steers Affective Processing

Influential theories have argued that affective processing is fundamentally different from cognitive processing. Others have suggested that theoretical boundaries between affective and cognitive processing are artificial and inherently problematic. Over recent years, different positions on these issues have fueled many empirical studies investigating the mechanisms underlying cognitive and affective processing. Where and on what basis should we draw the line between cognition and emotion? Are there fundamental distinctions to be made between the way emotion influences cognition and cognition influences emotion? How does the reciprocal interaction between emotion and cognition lead to adaptive behavior? This Research Topic explores the nature of the reciprocal interaction between emotion and cognition from a functional perspective

Language concatenates perceptual features into representations during comprehension

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Practice explains abolished behavioral adaptation after human dorsal anterior cingulate cortex lesions

The role of mid-cingulate cortex (MCC), also referred to as dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, in regulating cognitive control is a topic of primary importance in cognitive neuroscience. Although many studies have shown that MCC responds to cognitive demands, lesion studies in humans are inconclusive concerning the causal role of the MCC in the adaptation to these demands. By elegantly combining single-cell recordings with behavioural methods, Sheth et al. [Sheth, S. et al. Human dorsal anterior cingulate cortex neurons mediate ongoing behavioural adaptation. Nature 488, 218–22 (2012).] recently were able to show that neurons in MCC encode cognitive demand. Importantly, this study also claimed that focal lesions of the MCC abolished behavioural adaptation to cognitive demands. Here we show that the absence of post-cingulotomy behavioural adaptation reported in this study may have been due to practice effects. We run a control condition where we tested subjects before and after a dummy treatment, which substituted cingulotomy with a filler task (presentation of a documentary). The results revealed abolished behavioural adaptation following the dummy treatment. Our findings suggest that future work using proper experimental designs is needed to advance the understanding of the causal role of the MCC in behavioural adaptation.Action Contro

Under What Conditions Can Recursion Be Learned? Effects of Starting Small in Artificial Grammar Learning of Center-Embedded Structure

It has been suggested that external and/or internal limitations paradoxically may lead to superior learning, that is, the concepts of starting small and less is more (Elman,; Newport,). In this paper, we explore the type of incremental ordering during training that might help learning, and what mechanism explains this facilitation. We report four artificial grammar learning experiments with human participants. In Experiments 1a and 1b we found a beneficial effect of starting small using two types of simple recursive grammars: right-branching and center-embedding, with recursive embedded clauses in fixed positions and fixed length. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 100). In Experiment 3 and 4, we used a more complex center-embedded grammar with recursive loops in variable positions, producing strings of variable length. When participants were presented an incremental ordering of training stimuli, as in natural language, they were better able to generalize their knowledge of simple units to more complex units when the training input “grew” according to structural complexity, compared to when it “grew” according to string length. Overall, the results suggest that starting small confers an advantage for learning complex center-embedded structures when the input is organized according to structural complexity

Troubling anomalies and exciting conjectures: A bipolar model of scientific discovery

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Detecting cognitive interactions through eye movement transitions

Many eye tracking studies are designed to reveal the co-activation of representations in interactive cognitive systems, such as lexical candidates in the human language system. Such co-activation is presumed to occur within participants on a trial-level. However, traditional analyses mostly use the viewing tendency of participants over trials (e.g., average fixation proportions to visual referents), rather than individual fixation patterns within trials (e.g., consecutive fixations across visual referents). Instead, we argue that assessing temporal dependencies of eye movements between relevant referents is better suited for detecting co-activation in an interactive system, compared to other oft-used methods that may falsely accept or reject interaction hypotheses. We demonstrate how to analyze eye movement transitions with a multilevel markov modeling approach using a relevant experimental example (bilingual co-activation in a visual world paradigm), and discuss the practical applications and theoretical implications when analyzing transitions in any type of eye tracking data

Under what conditions can recursion be learned? Effects of starting small in artificial grammar learning of center‐embedded structure

It has been suggested that external and/or internal limitations paradoxically may lead to superior learning, that is, the concepts of starting small and less is more (Elman, 1993; Newport, 1990). In this paper, we explore the type of incremental ordering during training that might help learning, and what mechanism explains this facilitation. We report four artificial grammar learning experiments with human participants. In Experiments 1a and 1b we found a beneficial effect of starting small using two types of simple recursive grammars: right-branching and center-embedding, with recursive embedded clauses in fixed positions and fixed length. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2 (N=100). In Experiment 3 and 4, we used a more complex center-embedded grammar with recursive loops in variable positions, producing strings of variable length. When participants were presented an incremental ordering of training stimuli, as in natural language, they were better able to generalize their knowledge of simple units to more complex units when the training input “grew” according to structural complexity, compared to when it “grew” according to string length. Overall,the results suggest that starting small confers an advantage for learning complex center-embedded structures when the input is organized according to structural complexity.Action Contro

The p3 event-related potential as an index ofmotivational relevance a conditioning experiment

Watching motivationally relevant pictures modulates two types of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), the early posterior negativity (EPN) and the P3. Several studies show that the EPN and P3 to emotional stimuli are enhanced as compared to neutral stimuli. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether experimentally conditioned abstract stimuli (Gabor patches) that predict the occurrence of a subsequent emotional event are able to elicit an enhanced EPN and P3. This would confirm that these ERP components indeed reflect the motivational relevance of a stimulus, rather than other stimulus properties such as complexity. In a conditioning paradigm, abstract patches (conditioned stimuli; CS) were contingently paired with emotional or neutral pictures (unconditioned stimuli; UCS). Both EPN and P3 to these CS were measured in 80 healthy participants. The results demonstrate an enhanced P3 to CS predicting emotional stimuli as compared to CS predicting neutral stimuli. The EPN was not modulated by the CS. These results show that the P3 is a suitable index of acquired motivational relevance and is not, at least not completely, dependent on task-irrelevant stimulus properties such as complexity and contrast. The EPN seems less suitable as an index of recently acquired motivational relevance because, although the CS acquired emotional significance, this did not result in the typical EPN modulation