An Exploratory Study into the Use of Psychology Participant Panels in Psychology Departments in the United Kingdom

Psychology Participant Pools (PPP) are known to be used within psychology departments in the United Kingdom as a way to promote understanding of psychological research and as a means to aid students and researchers to collect data. However, there is currently no information regarding the different practices undertaken in each department. This article represents a first exploration in this endeavour by asking representatives from these departments to complete a survey. General findings revealed that the number of studies conducted were either under 20 or over 40, Level 4 students had to obtain slightly more credits than Level 5 students, a range of activities were observed for those participants who did not obtain all their credits, and the PPP was more often than not tied to a research methods module. Despite receiving responses from around only a third of departments, the results revealed a wide range of behaviours across the departments. We feel that these are useful for departments who wish to establish, or update, their own PPP, but also recognise that a larger study is required to more accurately capture the use of PPPs in the United Kingdom

Postcategorical auditory distraction in short-term memory: Insights from increased task load and task type

Task-irrelevant speech impairs short-term serial recall appreciably. On the interference-by-process account, the processing of physical (i.e., pre-categorical) changes in speech yields order cues that conflict with the serial-ordering process deployed to perform the serial recall task. In this view, the post-categorical properties (e.g., phonology, meaning) of speech play no role. The present study reassessed the implications of recent demonstrations of auditory post-categorical distraction in serial recall that have been taken as support for an alternative, attentional-diversion, account of the irrelevant speech effect. Focusing on the disruptive effect of emotionally valent compared to neutral words on serial recall, we show that the distracter-valence effect is eliminated under conditions—high task-encoding load—thought to shield against attentional diversion whereas the general effect of speech (neutral words compared to quiet) remains unaffected (Experiment 1). Furthermore, the distracter-valence effect generalizes to a task that does not require the processing of serial order—the missing-item task—while the effect of speech per se is attenuated in this task (Experiment 2). We conclude that post-categorical auditory distraction phenomena in serial short-term memory are incidental: they are observable in such a setting but, unlike the acoustically driven irrelevant speech effect, are not integral to it. As such, the findings support a duplex-mechanism account over a unitary view of auditory distraction

An exploration of project allocation procedures in UK psychology departments

Background: Psychology undergraduate projects are important to students’ learning experience and degree classification. A key factor in this process is the allocation of the student to the supervisor yet there is little research regarding how this is best accomplished for student satisfaction. In many cases this is done manually, with a human (project allocator) matching students’ interests with supervisors’ topics. However, some authors suggest applying an algorithm to match up student and supervisors according to rankings expressed by both sides, or matching by algorithm to student-only ranked preferences. Objective: The objective was to discover the extent to which a matching strategy was used, and ascertain what other procedures were adopted, in allocating psychology students to project supervisors. A second objective was to discover useful information about the overall project, such as when students received the name of the supervisor, or which methods and psychological areas students preferred. Thus, this study set out to audit departments regarding student and supervisor numbers, discover when and how students were being informed about the allocation and project, ascertain the variability of procedures involved in allocating students to topics/supervisors, and uncover which methods and topics students preferred. Method: Twenty-eight UK psychology departments completed a survey asking about aspects of their department, staff, allocation process, and students as they pertained to the process of allocating psychology students to projects. Most data were quantitative with some narrative responses sought. Results: Key findings were that departments often used more than one strategy. The four most common strategies, adopted by over 40% of departments were requiring a human project allocator to manually match students to topics/supervisors (~63%), students ranking project topics (~56%), and supervisors suggesting topics (~41%). An algorithm matching strategy was only adopted by a minority of departments (~15%). Twenty-five % of departments did not inform their students who their supervisor was until the final year of their degree, and respondents felt that their students preferred quantitative above qualitative methods, and clinical, health, and forensic compared to other modules. Conclusion: Although algorithmic strategies were used by some departments and may well be less onerous to implement, they were not that common compared to manual project allocation. Future research should explore the reasons for this and the overall usefulness of these strategies for student experience and grade outcomes. Finally, we hope that this paper will provide a information to those responsible for allocating students to supervisors to help them to decide how to approach this important task

The Categorical Deviation Effect May Be Underpinned by Attentional Capture: Preliminary Evidence from the Incidental Recognition of Distracters

The performance of a visual focal task is appreciably disrupted by an unexpected change (or deviation) in the properties of a task irrelevant auditory background. A vast amount of evidence suggests that a change in the acoustic properties of sound disrupts performance via attentional capture. However, an emerging body of evidence suggests that the disruption of task performance by a change in semantic category within a stream of sounds does not behave the same and is therefore not produced by attentional capture. This preliminary study aimed to further investigate whether the disruption produced by a categorical deviant was underpinned by attentional capture. In a single experiment, participants were presented with an irrelevant sound stream while they memorized a categorized list for free recall. We examined whether free recall performance was disrupted by an unexpected change in category within the sound and later investigated, via a surprise recognition test, whether participants had superior memory for deviant items as compared to items from the same positions in control sequences. Results revealed that the categorical deviation effect manifested in poorer free recall performance. Additionally, post-study, participants demonstrated better recognition memory for deviant items compared to control items. On the assumption that explicit recognition requires attentional encoding of deviant items, our results yield evidence that the categorical deviation effect may indeed be produced via attentional capture

A double dissociative study into the effectiveness of computational thinking

We propose the first steps towards a rigorous analysis of the effectiveness of an emerging pedagogy, Computational Thinking. We found that two aspects of the pedagogy have a positive effect with regards to enhancing two cognitive processes, namely sequential thinking and in abstract thinking. Our data was gathered experimentally with a cohort of mixed-ability undergraduate students enrolled on three distinct courses. The study employed a mixed 2 x 2 factorial design with type of classroom intervention, measurements were taken at baseline and following delivery of computational thinking methodologies designed to focus on specific components of the pedagogy. The dependent variable was percentage improvement from baseline, and the analyses were conducted using 2 x 2 mixed ANOVA, an alpha criterion of p<.05 was adopted for all analyses. The specific components investigated were algorithmic thinking and abstraction, and we found a positive correlation between enhancements of sequentiality and abstract thinking

Boundaries of Semantic Distraction: Dominance and Lexicality Act at Retrieval

Three experiments investigated memory for semantic information with the goal of determining boundary conditions for the manifestation of semantic auditory distraction. Irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category-exemplars to an equal degree regardless of whether the speech coincided with presentation or test phases of the task (Experiment 1) and occurred regardless of whether it comprised random words or coherent sentences (Experiment 2). The effects of background speech were greater when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material, but only when the irrelevant words were high in output dominance (Experiment 3). The implications of these findings in relation to the processing of task material and the processing of background speech is discussed

Cohort profile: The UK COVID-19 Public Experiences (COPE) prospective longitudinal mixed-methods study of health and well-being during the SARSCoV2 coronavirus pandemic

Public perceptions of pandemic viral threats and government policies can influence adherence to containment, delay, and mitigation policies such as physical distancing, hygienic practices, use of physical barriers, uptake of testing, contact tracing, and vaccination programs. The UK COVID-19 Public Experiences (COPE) study aims to identify determinants of health behaviour using the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation (COM-B) model using a longitudinal mixed-methods approach. Here, we provide a detailed description of the demographic and self-reported health characteristics of the COPE cohort at baseline assessment, an overview of data collected, and plans for follow-up of the cohort. The COPE baseline survey was completed by 11,113 UK adult residents (18+ years of age). Baseline data collection started on the 13th of March 2020 (10-days before the introduction of the first national COVID-19 lockdown in the UK) and finished on the 13th of April 2020. Participants were recruited via the HealthWise Wales (HWW) research registry and through social media snowballing and advertising (Facebook®, Twitter®, Instagram®). Participants were predominantly female (69%), over 50 years of age (68%), identified as white (98%), and were living with their partner (68%). A large proportion (67%) had a college/university level education, and half reported a pre-existing health condition (50%). Initial follow-up plans for the cohort included in-depth surveys at 3-months and 12-months after the first UK national lockdown to assess short and medium-term effects of the pandemic on health behaviour and subjective health and well-being. Additional consent will be sought from participants at follow-up for data linkage and surveys at 18 and 24-months after the initial UK national lockdown. A large non-random sample was recruited to the COPE cohort during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, which will enable longitudinal analysis of the determinants of health behaviour and changes in subjective health and well-being over the course of the pandemic