'a critical test of combined cognitive bias hypothesis' (AsPredicted #31829)
Author(s) zhen zhang (radboud university nijmegen) - z.zhang@bsi.ru.nl
Pre-registered on 2019/11/26 - 07:58 AM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? We hypothesize that training attention and interpretation bias will also affect memory bias for the same, for new and for autobiographical information.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. both near and far transfer effects on memory bias will be assessed after participants completed attention and interpretation training. the measurements are: 1. free recall (after finishing all experiments); 2. self-reference encoding task(after finishing all experiments); 3. autobiographic memory test ( after each training day).
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? two conditions: positive training group and negative training group
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will run ANOVAs with training conditions as a factor and memory bias (different parameters to assess the reach of transfer) as dependent variables. The association between training strength of the training (so the change in attention and interpretation bias) and the transfer to memory bias will also be assessed.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. we will exclude participants who continually missed more than 3 sentence making trails.
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. A total of 80 unselected students (aged >18) of Radboud University Nijmegen will be randomly allocated to either the positive training (n=40) or the negative training condition (n=40). Individuals with scores higher than 28 on Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II, Beck, Steer, &Brown, 1996; Dutch translation, van der Does 2002) will not be invited for the study, because we did not want to expose participants with severe depressive symptom levels to a negative condition (Beck et al., 1996).
Power calculation is based on the previous work in Sanchez’s study which used MCAT as training method (Sanchez et al., 2019), the effect size of targeted bias change(attention and interpretation bias) induced by the MCAT is Cohen’s f = 0.834. This provides our best estimate for the training effect size. Based on ANOVA statistical test, the power analysis with G*Power indicated that 14 participants will be needed to achieve 0.8 power with an alpha level of .05. As in our study design, both the near and far transfer effect on pure memory bias are expected. In considering of the transfer effect size would be much weaker, we need more participants to achieve power 0.8. Because there is no better estimation of the transfer effect size available as this is an innovative work, we conservatively decided to recruit 40 participants for each group.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) no
