Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 5 authors.
Pre-registered on 2020/11/21 - 02:09 PM (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 task effort exerts a quadratic influence on mental energy replenishment at task completion. Exceedingly small or large investments of effort result in less post-task energy replenishment than a moderate amount of effort investment. Furthermore, we suggest that this effect of task effort on energy replenishment is attenuated when the value of task reward decreases.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. The measure of mental energy:
Before you continue, we would like to know how much mental energy you have at this moment. People's mental energy fluctuates on a moment-to-moment basis. On the following scale, please indicate how much mental energy you feel you have at this moment. (1 = Less mental energy than usual, 7 = More mental energy than usual)
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? 6 conditions. The study will use a 2(reward: high vs. low) * 3(effort: low vs. moderate vs. high) between-subjects design.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will first calculate mental energy replenishment by subtracting pre-completion mental energy from post-completion mental energy. Then we will conduct a two-way ANOVA with reward (low vs. high) and effort (low vs. moderate vs. high) as between-subject factors and mental energy replenishment as the dependent variable. We predict a significant two-way interaction between reward and effort. In the high reward condition, there will be a significant effect of effort on energy replenishment. We will further conduct planned contrasts to show that energy replenishment in the moderate effort condition is greater than that in the low effort or high effort condition (one-tailed tests). In the low reward condition, there will be no significant effect of effort and planned contrasts (two-tailed tests) will show no significant differences between the low effort and moderate effort condition as well as the high effort and moderate effort condition.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. In this study, participants will complete a transcription task. Participants who provide irrelevant responses (e.g., "good", "yes", "none") in the transcriptions will be excluded.
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. 400
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) Nothing else to pre-register.
