According to the literature, caffeine affects on cognitive performance (memory, attention, etc.). Also, the location of attention focus may affects postural stability. Now, what is the best research design or protocol to assess the effects of caffeine and attention focus on postural control?
You may want to use structural equation modeling to test the effects. SEM is more flexible than standard regression in terms of treating a given variable as both dependent and independent variable. For instance, perhaps you would seek to treat attention as a mediating variable between caffeine consumption and postural control.
Best wishes,
Damian
Thanks for your answer. It seems that it is wrong to have two groups of external and internal attention focus. Please let me know more about it
Regards,
Saeed
Hi,
It seems one option is a 2 (caffeine or no caffeine) x 2 (locus of attention) experimental design:
1. No caffeine, internal attentional focus
2. No caffeine, external attentional focus
3. With caffeine, internal attentional focus
2. With caffeine, external attentional focus
You could then infer whether the two IVs are having independent effects on postural control as well as whether they interact in some way (e.g., attention only modulates the effect of caffeine if its focus is internal)
You could run these four conditions on the same group of participants (e.g., on different days) and counterbalance the order of conditions across participants (and check at the analysis stage whether condition-order interacted with the effects of the real IVs of interest; hopefully there won't be so you can then proceed to a repeated-measures ANOVA)
Best
Rob
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