Recent student projects

2012-2013

Economic decision making

Sam Turmer investigated the effect of anxiety on economic decisions. Participants were divided in two groups. One group was asked to watch a section of a scary movie, another group watched a section of a documentary. A questionnaire measured anxiety levels before and after the movie clip, while economic decisions were assessed by asking people to choose between pairs of gambles. Scores on the questionnaire showed that the scary movie clip increased people's anxiety. This increase also influenced economic decisions. Participants who watched the scary movie clip less often choose the more risky gamble, while no such difference was found for people watching the documentary.

Edvinas Adomenas examined the influence on people's decisions of how choice options are presented. Participants were presented with pairs of gambles, and they were asked to indicate which gamble sounded the most attractive to them. Every pair was presented twice (but hidden in a series of other choices). One time the pair was shown in normal font, the other time a special font (colour, size, or highlighting) was used to put a stronger focus on one of the gambles. Traditional theories of decision making predict that such focus on one of the gambles does not influence people's decision. In contrast to this prediction, the size and highlighting significantly affected people's decisions, but in opposite directions. Highlighting led to people turning away from the highlighted choice, increases in size attracted people's choices.

Social attention

Nicole Law investigated the influence of other people's gaze direction on attention. Specifically, she examined the influence of the observer's gender and the observed person's gender on this attention effect. Participants were asked to respond to letters left and right on the screen while faces of people were presented in the middle of the screen that looked in the direction of the letter or away from it. Attention shifts were measured by comparing response times to letters that were either looked at or not looked at. A complex interaction was found between the effect of the observer's gender and the observed person's gender on attention shifts.

(Example of the stimulus display. Images from the Radboud Face database were used rather than this image from the literature).

Object manipulation

Daniel Kral investigated how people take hold of an object when they have to move it to another location. Participants were seated at a table and were asked to pick up a plastic bowl with their right hand and to move it to a predefined location and place it in a predefined orientation. While previous studies have suggested that people take into account the posture in which they end the movement, this strategy did not seem to be used for the bowl grasping task. Data from this project has been published in: Hermens, Kral & Rosenbaum (2014). Acta Psychologica.

(Example of a grasp, posed by an actor).

Stimulus Goodness

Martin Haracz examined response times to dot patterns of different stimulus 'Goodness'. Participants were asked to determine as quickly as possible whether the presented dot patterns were identical or not. Response times were affected by the Goodness of the patterns as well as by whether the patterns were presented in the same orientation. Data from this project has been published in: Hermens, Lachmann & Van Leeuwen (in press). Psychological Research.

(Examples of dot patterns used in the experiment).