TITLE OF RESEARCH: Cognitive and Computational Mechanisms of Decision Making
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Robb Rutledge, PhD
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR'S DEPARTMENT: Psychology
Research Study Summary:
You are being invited to take part in a research study. Before you decide to participate in this study, it is important that you understand why the research is being done and what it will involve. Please take the time to read the following information carefully.
Purpose of the research:
The purpose of this study is to advance our understanding of how humans make decisions.
Study Procedures:
You may be asked to complete one or more tasks that focus on aspects of learning and decision making. We may ask you to complete a number of self-report questionnaires meant to gauge your emotions, personality, attitudes, behavior, and to record information about your recent experience. You will receive a minimum of $8 per hour for your participation, based on typical completion times and prorated for partial hours, including any bonuses due to task performance. If you decide to participate in this study, please understand that your participation is voluntary, and you have the right to withdraw your consent or discontinue participation at any time. The entire experiment will be conducted online on your own computerized device in a place of your choosing. The research will sometimes involve multiple sessions, with each session not expected to last longer than two hours, and with much shorter sessions being typical.
Benefits and Risks:
It is important that you understand that there is no direct benefit to you anticipated from your participation in this study, however we hope that our results will help to increase our understanding of human decision making. It is possible but unlikely that this task may cause you discomfort or fatigue. To minimize risk, you will be given breaks and are free to withdraw at any time without any loss of payment. Although the study materials are selected to avoid highly emotional or evocative stimuli, there is a small risk that you may have an adverse reaction while completing aspects of the study. There is a slight chance you may feel frustrated or uncomfortable if a task is difficult, and you are free to discontinue your participation in the study if you choose without any loss of payment.
Alternatives: The alternative to participating in this particular study is to not participate.
Confidentiality:
All of your responses will be held in confidence. Only the researchers involved in this study and those responsible for research oversight (such as representatives of the Yale University Human Research Protection Program, the Yale University Institutional Review Boards, and others) will have access to any information that could identify you that you provide. We will share it with others if you agree to it or when we have to do it because U.S. or State law requires it. For example, we will tell somebody if we learn that you are hurting a child or an older person.
Completion of this study is anonymous. We will not know your name. We will not be able to connect any identifying information to your responses. However, your account is associated with an ID for the online testing platform (e.g., Prolific, Amazon Mechanical Turk) that the researcher may have to see in order to pay you and in order to link your data from multiple sessions. This ID could possibly be connected to your public profile, which could, in theory, be searched. We want to stress that we will not be looking at anyone’s public profiles. We will keep the information about your participation in this research confidential.
Who to contact with questions:
1. PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Robb Rutledge, PhD, Yale Department of Psychology, email: rutledge.lab@yale.edu
2. If you have questions regarding your rights as a research subject, or if problems arise which you do not feel you can discuss with the Investigator, please contact the Institutional Review Board at:
Yale University Human Subjects Committee
Phone: (203) 785-4688
Email: hrpp@yale.edu
Agreement to Participate:
By clicking the "Accept" button below, you acknowledge that you have read and understood the above and
voluntarily agree to participate in this study.
Accept
Randomness game
Unfortunately, this study does not work in your current browser. Please use Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. Sorry!
In this task, you are going to generate random locations.
On each 'trial', you'll see 9 black boxes forming a square grid. You'll want to click on one of the boxes randomly. When you click on a box, it will turn blue for a short time, after which time you can click another random box.
Your goal is to produce the most random sequence possible, so try your best to act like a truly random machine. Don't overthink it; just try your best to be random.
You'll do this about 250 times. That may sound like a lot, but each 'trial' only takes a second or two, so the time will go by quickly. Please do make sure to pay attention and be as random as possible throughout the entire task.
After you do this task, you will be redirected to another, similar task. You will be instructed about that task before beginning it. You must complete both tasks in order to complete the study and get it approved.
Press the button below to begin.
If all the boxes are black, click a random location.
Please describe the task you had to complete in this study
If you had to guess, what do you think was the purpose of this study?
What is 1 + 1?
You can also feel free to leave any comments below about how the experiment went, but that's up to you. Did everything seem to work OK?
Your browser should automatically redirect you to the webpage of the second task. After completing that, you will finish the study.
Redirecting in seconds.
If you're not automatically redirected in a few seconds, please copy and paste this address on your web browser: