Studies of Human Inference Using On-line Testing

Not Applicable

Recruiting

• Conditions: Behavior
• Interventions: Behavioral: psychophysics

• Registration Number: NCT05848752
• Lead Sponsor: University of Colorado, Boulder

Brief Summary

The investigators will record behavioral responses from human participants on crowdsourcing platform Prolific to identify the decision strategies humans apply short-term, long-term, and multi timescale (across both timescales) inference tasks. Participants will perform a Jar Switching Task (described in Research Strategy Aim 1- "Jar Switching Task") in which balls are drawn with replacement from one of two known jars. The current jar in use switches based on an underlying change rate across trials. Subjects must perform three task blocks: 1) report the current jar in use (short-term inference), 2) predict the subsequent jar (long-term inference), and 3) both report and predict the jars (multi-timescale inference). The investigators will record these responses, the number (and sequence) of balls drawn, and the response time (time from the end of trial until the response) for each trial. Subjects will perform all blocks (parameters and number of blocks to be determined by inference model development and testing prior to task development) so that we can compare responses at each timescale. Since participants participate voluntarily for small sums of money (around $10/ hour based on duration of task) and the investigators' previous studies have collected over 200 subjects in a matter of days, they will aim to record behavioral data from 1000 subjects. This number allows them to address the broad range of subject variability expected using Bayesian statistical methods such as Bayes factors.

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Study First Submitted: 2023-04-19
• Study First Submitted QC: 2023-04-28
• Study First Posted: 2023-05-08
• Study Start: 2025-02-15
• Status Verified: 2025-03
• Last Update Submitted: 2025-03-24
• Last Update Posted: 2025-03-27
• Primary Completion: 2025-06
• Study Completion: 2025-07

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: RECRUITING
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 1000

Inclusion Criteria

• Adult Prolific participants who have a 95% approval rating and achieve a minimum score of 80% on our pre-test,
• Speak fluent English
• Are in the US.

Exclusion Criteria

• None

Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: SINGLE_GROUP

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
Environmental Feature Experiment	psychophysics	-

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Binary Behavioral Decision Responses	Through task completion on each task trial, approximately 1-5x/ minute for approximate 30 minutes	Subject- provided choices (responses on the computer) between two presented options

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

University of Colorado Boulder; 🇺🇸 Boulder, Colorado, United States