Studies of Human Inference Using On-line Testing

University of Colorado Boulder (CU)

Status: Enrolling

Conditions: Behavior

Treatments: Behavioral: psychophysics

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05848752

21-0065

Details and patient eligibility

About

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.

Enrollment: 1,000 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

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

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

---

1,000 participants in 1 patient group

Environmental Feature Experiment

Experimental group

Treatment:

Behavioral: psychophysics