I am hoping to run a cognitive load manipulation while participants respond to an attribution questionnaire. However, rather than using a typical working memory task where participants are asked to memorize and recall a string of digits while responding to the questionnaire, I would rather have a distractor task such as a string of digits appearing and participants have to press a key if they see the digit "5" for example. Does anyone know of a program where I can run this type of task?
Dear Joanne,
I do not know about a digit search task. It involves eye movements (?) and the linguistic system. Thus, you might have interference on different levels.
Instead, we worked a lot with multiple objects tracking tasks. An example is http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0168087 . Indeed, tracking pupil size might be a good idea :)
My 2ct, Peter
Hi Joanne,
I'm not sure to what extent your question concerns the task or the implementation (i.e., computer program) of the task, so I'll try to answer both.
You can do a simple digit detection task but I'm not sure how you would manipulate the load, then.You might want to check out the N-back task, which allows you to choose for different levels of difficulty/cognitive load from (typically) 0-back or 1-back to 3-back (more than this is barely doable).
As for the computer program to handle the presentation of stimuli and the collection of responses, numerous programs would do, such as e-prime or matlab if you have/can afford a license or psychopy if you wanna go for free / open-source for instance.
[edit] You may also want to use an auditory version of the task; it's quite easy to do.
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Lionel
Dear Joanne,
I agree with Peter König that a visual search task interferes with reading the questionnaire. So I would use an aural search task, which can range from detecting high tones (easy) to detecting a specific rhythm pattern in a stream of beats (difficult). Or let the subjects verify spoken arithmetic problems (e.g. "three plus four is nine").
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