You are absolutely right. It is advisable to take into account many features at the preparatory stage of the study and in the preparation of the survey protocol. Please, study the experience of professionals in the manuscripts in Attachment.

agree with @Vladimir A. Kulchitsky

regards

Following

Hi, all,

Thanks for your answer. Actually I need questionnaires that can ensure me that the "healthy" subjects are indeed mentally and physically healthy. My potential subjects are mainly university students and some faculties. After some searching and looking into the suggested articles, I am interested in the following questionnaires:

1. General Health Questionnaire

2. Montreal Cognitive Assessment

3. Mini-Mental State Examination

4. Edinburgh Handedness Inventory

However, it seems that some questionnaires listed above are not free (need to purchase) and may need some certification to perform.

Are there any free and widely recognize questionnaires that can help me to screen the subject?

In natural sciences observations and preliminary experiments provide first experience with a phenomenon. We can not ask questions without experience with nature! There is no appropriate questionnaire without detailed knowledge of the phenomenon. Therefore, after consulting the previous knowledge in literature it is essential that one learns about the phenomenon in hands on experiments. In neuroscience our personal experience frequently generates doubts about results published previously.

Thus, we can not ask questions without knowing what the questions should be about.

Except for the handedness scale, the others are not free and may require some expertise in running. There is also ethical issues. What if someone scores low on these cognitive scales; do you exclude them? and if so, do you tell them why? What we have been doing lately (although welcome other suggestions) is ask general questions about their health... any relevant injuries and health problems. We assume if they can arrange to make their appointment, that they do not suffer from cognitive impairments (i.e. would score very well on the very easy mini mental scale).

To my knowledge and experience, it is not an absolute must for participants to fill up questionnaires before a psychology experiment. They can fill it up at the end of the experiment as long as the questionnaire is not health-related or handedness-related. Since you are doing EEG and eye-tracking, you should consider assessing your participants' visual acuity and contrast sensitivity before the start of the experiment. You should also make sure that your participants do not have previous head or eye injuries that might adversely affect their test performance. For this reason, you should administer a short health survey prior to their participation.

This question is very conditional. Without enumerating the issues, my immediate surprise was that you seem to not know what you are doing or why you are doing it.

"We have no prior background in psychology, but we have heard that some psychology lab let the subjects do some questionnaires before the actual experiment".

Your candidates for the research are not laboratory rats, creatures we regard as lower than ourselves who can tolerate suffering and who are unlikely to be ostracised or characterised owing to your blundering around, what you are proposing requires professional skills. The people you examine would, presumably, be trusting you, or have been re-assured...how did you do that when in the dark yourselves?

" how can I find appropriate questionnaire? If no, then what kind of experiment need a questionnaire before hand? "

You are using E.E.G. with no experience....how can this be permitted.? You have no studied psycho-medical background in eye movements. Presumably it is not a "rendition-centre" where you operate but some type of sponsored arrangement or some kind of independent research with access to medical equipment.

Something is significantly wrong in such a research being granted permission and with no professional approach and decisions on method and methodology....The other commentators may not have picked-up on it, or been reluctant to raise the issue but for me it is immediately obvious and we as ethical researchers guarding the quality of research itself should bring it up for you to ponder.

Obviously I am.

I think you are entering into a research danger zone and one which may be very disrespectful of the candidates, undermine yourselves and give you invalid outcome.

I think you should go through a mentoring process with a professional psychologist perhaps psychiatrist, determine your research wants question then , perhaps through "Delphi" or a regression conference decide what is the best in a particular question based also in why the research? what you need? How you will conduct it? When to do it? What essential-to-such-a-research-question resources you have? and the suitability of your candidates and yourselves.

Give that some thought....(?)

Hi Anthony Clancy

Thanks for the issue you bring up to here. I think there are some misunderstandings and I should clarify a bit.

What I mean by "no experience in psychology" is that we have not published any paper in this field, not we have purchased the experiment device on day 1 then do the experiment on day 2. Before we start this project, we have spent about 1 year reading books and papers, learning data analyzing methods, trying different EEG and eye-tracking devices before finally purchasing them, attending to conferences and workshops, and running pilot experiment on ourselves. So regarding to the experiment techniques, we are definitely not newbies when recruiting participants. But I think given my mentor's >15 years' experience on animal neuroscience, our experience on psychology is still very limited, but it is field that we hope to explore.

Also we are not doing any medical research. The device we purchased are for basic research only.

The reason that I ask this question is that we have largely ignored the questionnaire part of the experiment when preparing for it (animals never take questionnaires), but in practice when we recruit subjects we see great variations in individual characteristics, in one rare case we started to think whether the person is indeed normal. Under the hope to make our data being more representative, we start to learn different questionnaires to access individual characters.

Thanks for your answer and your reminding anyway.

Hi Thanks for expanding. (With a grin) animals do answer questionnaires you may not realise it, they can only talk to you by their own speech and 'body language'.

I'm still not at all comfortable with the preparation, laboratory conditions and your proposal's likely validity, but that's of no moment to you....I think I am more concerned with what goes on with the people with electrodes attached and what they think, believe and have been told. An experiment such as yours to be respected requires extensive and complete detailing for repeatability/reconstruction Stein Mh, but from where I sit, also truly professionally qualified and well experienced and skilled technicians a variety of note-takers and people with neuroscience mastery. Do you get my thinking? My regards