'The impact of informational cognitive conflict on attention and memory.' (AsPredicted #11,718)
Author(s) Anne Schüler (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien) - a.schueler@iwm-tuebingen.de Yvonne Kammerer (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien) - kammerer@hdm-stuttgart.de Daniela Becker (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien) - daniela.becker@ru.nl
Pre-registered on 2018/06/10 23:30 (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? The main aim of the study is to investigate the impact of informational conflicts on attention allocation and memory.
We expect that the processing of two conflicting explanations leads to different attentional behaviour and different memory performance as the processing of two conflicting explanations for which the conflict is resolved (labeled “non-conflicting explanations” in the following). Additional, we assume that resolving the conflict between the two explanations before the second explanation is read will lead to less intensive processing and less memory of the two explanations then resolving the conflict after the second explanation had been read and – even more pronounced – not resolving the conflict at all.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Gaze behaviour: We will measure fixation time / fixation counts on (potentially) conflicting and other additional text information as well as transitions between both texts.
Subjective evaluation of both texts: We will ask participants to rate both texts regarding several aspects (i.e., interest, persuasiveness, difficulty, comprehensibility, imagery).
Memory: We will measure open recall of both texts, differentiating by (potentially) conflicting information (i.e., different explanations for the same phenomena) as well as other text information. Additional, we will measure cued recall by a cloze test.
Manipulation check: We will ask participants whether one of both texts included the actual explanation for the phenomena, and if so, which of both texts.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? Three between-subject conditions: Condition 1 with conflicting explanations vs. condition 2a without conflicting explanations (the clarification of the conflict is presented at the beginning of the second text) vs. condition 2b without conflicting explanations (the clarification of the conflict is presented at the end of the second text).
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. Contrast analyses will be conducted to test whether the three conditions differ as assumed above.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. Outliers (more than two standard deviations from the group mean) will be replaced by group mean.
Participants are excluded from analyses if they did not behave according to instruction, if their eye tracking data are of low quality (e.g., no data registered, tracking ration below 80%, skewed eye tracking data in the gaze video).
Moreover, we will exclude participants if there are any disturbances regarding the flawless processing of the experiment (i.e., loud noises in front of the lab, power outages, system crashes).
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. We plan to collect 246 participants.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?)
