25  Explore, apply, reflect

🏢 Lab class

25.1 Article reading exercise

For this activity, you will need to read parts of an empirical journal article. It’s important to start reading primary research literature1 early in your course. As discussed in Chapter 2 of Beth’s book, empirical journal articles are the main way new findings are communicated in psychology.

Remember that 30% of your overall module mark will come from a lab report you write next semester. Every primary research article is essentially a lab report. So, if you want to understand how lab reports should be written, regularly reading journal articles is a great idea.

Before starting, you might want to revisit the section “Reading the Research” in Chapter 2 of Beth’s book. I agree with everything Beth says, but I want to champion the method section, which I think is the most under-appreciated part of an article. If you really want to understand what happened in a study, read the method section. It often provides the deepest insights into what the researchers actually did.

The article you are about to read (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016) examines the flanker interference effect. There’s a twist: the flankers are either letters or numbers, and some are ambiguous (e.g., O could be the number 0 or the letter O). Avital-Cohen and Tsal show that these ambiguous stimuli only elicit interference if participants interpret them as letters.

This finding is interesting because interference effects are often thought to be automatic (not under voluntary control) or driven by bottom-up processing (determined by the stimulus rather than your goals or instructions). In contrast, Avital-Cohen and Tsal’s results show that top-down processing does influence interference in the letter flanker task. This article is also a great example of how classic tasks can still yield new insights!

Your task

For Experiment 1 in the article, please identify:

  1. The design (i.e., between-subjects or within-subjects).
    • If between-subjects, posttest-only or pretest/posttest?
    • If within-subjects, was there any counterbalancing employed? If yes, how was this done?
  2. The IV(s), and the levels of the IV(s) (see hint below if you get stuck)
  3. The DV(s).
  4. Examples of constants.

Optional questions:

  1. How many trials did the experiment consist of overall?
  2. Can you think of a follow-up experiment to further investigate the effect?

Please work on this activity in pairs and use Copilot to clarify any terms you don’t know. Make sure you agree on one answer per question and write it down.

Before you start reading the article:

  • Think about which sections of the article (i.e., introduction, method, results, discussion) might be most relevant to answering the questions below, and focus on these sections.
  • Please note that to make it easier for you to identify the relevant parts of the article we have removed information pertaining to Experiment 2 from the article.


In a between-subjects design, different participants are exposed to different levels of the IV. In a within-subjects design, all participants are exposed to all levels of the IV.

In a posttest-only design, groups of participants are randomly assigned to levels of the IV and are tested on the DV of interest only once. In a pretest/posttest design, they are tested on the DV twice, once before and once after exposure to the IV.

Counterbalancing aims to control order effects in within-subjects designs. This can be achieved by full counterbalancing. E.g., if there were three different conditions (A, B and C) in an experiment, full counterbalancing would require six different orders:

A B C
A C B
B A C
B C A
C A B
C B A

Note that while the order of conditions would differ across participants, this is still a within-subjects design as all participants are exposed to all conditions.

Note that there are two IVs in this experiment.

The following document with the answers to the above questions is password-protected. We will tell you the password in the lab class.


Reference

Avital-Cohen, R., & Tsal, Y. (2016). Top-down processes override bottom-up interference in the flanker task. Psychological Science, 27(5), 651–658. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616631737

  1. Primary research literature reports original data collected by the authors, whereas meta-analyses aggregate and analyse data from multiple existing studies rather than collecting new raw data.↩︎