Open-source software for mouse-tracking in Qualtrics to measure category competition

Investigating psychological mechanisms of self-controlled decisions for food and leisure activity

Maintaining a healthy body weight requires balancing energy intake and expenditure. While previous research investigated energy input or food decisions, little is known about energy output or leisure activity decisions. By combining experimental decision-making paradigms and computational approaches, we investigated the psychological mechanisms of self-controlled food and leisure activity decisions through the effects of reward-oriented and health-oriented preferences as well as body weight status, stress, and coping. Based on individual's responses, the self-controlled food and leisure activity choices were indexed as the proportions of "no" unhealthy but tasty (or enjoyable) (inhibitory self-control against short-term pleasure) and "yes" healthy but not tasty (or not enjoyable) responses (initiatory self-control for long-term health benefits). The successful self-control decisions for food and leisure activity were positively correlated with each other, r = 22, p < .01. In beta regression analyses, the successful self-controlled food decisions decreased as the taste-oriented process increased, β = - 0.50, z = -2.99, p < .005, and increased as the health-oriented process increased, β = 1.57, z = 4.68, p < .001. Similarly, the successful self-controlled leisure activity decisions decreased as the enjoyment-oriented process increased, β = - 0.79, z = -5.31, p < .001, and increased as the health-oriented process increased, β = 0.66, z = 2.19, p < .05. The effects of the other factors were not significant. Overall, our findings demonstrated the mutual interrelationship between food and leisure activity decision-making and suggest that encouraging health-oriented processes may benefit both energy input and expenditure domains and improve self-controlled choices.

VOIS: A framework for recording Voice Over Internet Surveys

Verbal data provide researchers insight beyond that offered by text-based responses, including tone, reasoning elaboration, and experienced difficulty, among other processes. Additionally, it offers a less cognitively taxing way for participants to provide long responses. Verbal data collection methods are found in a variety of fields, mostly conducted in lab-based settings or requiring specialized hardware. Restricting verbal protocols to lab-based settings can have several drawbacks, including smaller sample sizes, biased populations, reduced adoption, and incompatibility with potential social distancing requirements. No method currently exists for researchers to collect verbal data within major online survey collection platforms. The current paper offers a user-friendly approach for collecting verbal data online, where a researcher can copy and paste JavaScript code into the desired survey platform. By providing a framework that does not require any advanced programming ability, researchers can collect verbal data in a scalable way using familiar modalities.

Making decisions about health information on social media: a mouse-tracking study

Health misinformation is a problem on social media, and more understanding is needed about how users cognitively process it. In this study, participants’ accuracy in determining whether 60 health claims were true (e.g., “Vaccines prevent disease outbreaks”) or false (e.g., “Vaccines cause disease outbreaks”) was assessed. The 60 claims were related to three domains of health risk behavior (i.e., smoking, alcohol and vaccines). Claims were presented as Tweets or as simple text statements. We employed mouse tracking to measure reaction times, whether processing happens in discrete stages, and response uncertainty. We also examined whether health literacy was a moderating variable. The results indicate that information in statements and tweets is evaluated incrementally most of the time, but with overrides happening on some trials. Adequate health literacy scorers were equally certain when responding to tweets and statements, but they were more accurate when responding to tweets. Inadequate scorers were more confident on statements than on tweets but equally accurate on both. These results have important implications for understanding the underlying cognition needed to combat health misinformation online.

Take it or leave it? Investigating the ambivalence and willingness to pay for suboptimal fruits and vegetables among organic consumers in Germany

Organic fruits and vegetables are often visually “suboptimal” because organic farming uses neither pesticides nor synthetic fertilisers to improve the cosmetic appearance of the produce. Despite the organic sector's natural and sustainable image, such foods often never reach the market or are left on the shelf, greatly increasing food waste. The current work hypothesised that an important factor in the rejection of suboptimal food is consumers' experience of ambivalence regarding these products. Data were collected through an online survey of (occasional) organic consumers in Germany (n = 493), including an online mouse-tracking experiment. We investigated the interplay of ambivalence with environmental concerns and attitudes towards suboptimal food that influence people's willingness to pay (WTP) for suboptimal fruits and vegetables. Our findings suggest that environmentally concerned consumers have more favourable attitudes and experience less ambivalence towards suboptimal food. Only subjective ambivalence was found to be directly associated with consumers' WTP, however, while attitudes were not. Based on these results, we propose measures for policymakers and food retailers to reduce such ambivalence and thus increase organic consumers' acceptance for suboptimal food.

Reducing variance or helping the poorest? A mouse tracking approach to investigate cognitive bases of inequality aversion in resource allocation

Humans dislike unequal allocations. Although often conflated, such 'inequality-averse' preferences are separable into two elements: egalitarian concern about the variance and maximin concern about the poorest (maximizing the minimum). Recent research has shown that the maximin concern operates more robustly in allocation decisions than the egalitarian concern. However, the real-time cognitive dynamics of allocation decisions are still unknown. Here, we examined participants' choice behaviour with high temporal resolution using a mouse-tracking technique. Participants made a series of allocation choices for others between two options: a 'non-Utilitarian option' with both smaller variance and higher minimum pay-off (but a smaller total) compared with the other 'Utilitarian option'. Choice data confirmed that participants had strong inequality-averse preferences, and when choosing non-utilitarian allocations, participants' mouse movements prior to choices were more strongly determined by the minimum elements of the non-Utilitarian options than the variance elements. Furthermore, a time-series analysis revealed that this dominance emerged at a very early stage of decision making (around 500 ms after the stimulus onset), suggesting that the maximin concern operated as a strong cognitive anchor almost instantaneously. Our results provide the first temporally fine-scale evidence that people weigh the maximin concern over the egalitarian concern in distributive judgements.

MatMouse: A Mouse Movements Tracking and Analysis Toolbox for Visual Search Experiments

The present study introduces a new MATLAB toolbox, called MatMouse, suitable for the performance of experimental studies based on mouse movements tracking and analysis. MatMouse supports the implementation of task-based visual search experiments. The proposed toolbox provides specific functions which can be utilized for the experimental building and mouse tracking processes, the analysis of the recorded data in specific metrics, the production of related visualizations, as well as for the generation of statistical grayscale heatmaps which could serve as an objective ground truth product. MatMouse can be executed as a standalone package or integrated in existing MATLAB scripts and/or toolboxes. In order to highlight the functionalities of the introduced toolbox, a complete case study example is presented. MatMouse is freely distributed to the scientific community under the third version of GNU General Public License (GPL v3) on GitHub platform.

Conducting Web-Based Experiments for Numerical Cognition Research

It is becoming increasingly popular and straightforward to collect data in cognitive psychology through web-based studies. In this paper, I review issues around web-based data collection for the purpose of numerical cognition research. Provided that the desired type of data can be collected through a web-browser, such online studies offer numerous advantages over traditional forms of physical lab-based data collection, such as gathering data from larger sample sizes in shorter time-windows and easier access to non-local populations. I then present results of two replication studies that employ classical paradigms in numerical cognition research: the number-size congruity paradigm and comparison to a given standard, which also included a masked priming manipulation. In both replications, reaction times and error rates were comparable to original, physical lab-based studies. Consistent with the results of original studies, a distance effect, a congruity effect, and a priming effect were observed. Data collected online thus offers a level of reliability comparable to data collected in a physical lab when it comes to questions in numerical cognition.