Spatial Toplogy Fractional Fractorials
The aim of this task is to investigate the ability to think about other's mental states. Participants will read stories and answer true or false questions. There will be two types of stories: 1) stories describing false beliefs ("belief") and 2) stories describing outdated, i.e. false photographs and maps ("Photo"). Both sets of stories required participants to represent false content; the critical difference was in the type of false content represented (i.e., a belief versus a photograph/map). Stories were followed by a true/false question that referred either to the situation in reality or to the false representation. We use the false belief task localizer task from Dodell-Feder and colleagues (2010).
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Example of BELIEF story: Expecting the game to be postponed because of the rain, the Garcia family took the subway home. The score was tied, 3-3. During their commute the rain stopped and the game soon ended with a score of 5-3.
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Example of BELIEF question The Garcia family arrives home believing the score is 5-3.
True False
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Example of PHOTO story: When the picture was taken of the house, it was one story tall. Since then, the renovators added an additional story and a garage.
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Example of PHOTO question: The house is currently one story.
True False
Spunt, R. P., & Adolphs, R. (2014). Validating the Why/How contrast for functional MRI studies of Theory of Mind. Neuroimage, 99, 301-311. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.05.023
The aim of this task is to investigate visual search facilitation with visual cues. Participants will be asked to look for a target and identify which direction it was presented, left or right, as fast as they can. (In the figure, the target is presented as an asterisk). In addition to the target, three different cue types will be presented: congruent, incongruent, and neutral. We hypothesize that congruent trials will help visual search where people will be faster at identifying the target. This study will be a replicate of the posner cueing task from Hietanen and colleagues (2016). While we plan on using a smiley face and arrow as our visual cue, the design is subject to change and the drawing up above may not reflect the actual smiley face or arrow used in the experiment.
We plan to investigate memory encoding and retrieval. Participants will view a number of black-and-white drawings. They will be asked to memorize the items ("encode"). Afterwards, they will be shown a number of drawings - some will have been presented during the "encode" stage, some will be novel drawings. Participants will determine whether they saw the item before or not. Responses will be collected with a button press.
- Tim Curran lab