20  Article reading exercise

For this activity, you will need to read parts of an empirical journal article. We think that it is really important that you start reading primary research literature early on in your course. As discussed in Chapter 2 of Beth’s book, empirical journal articles are the main way to communicate new findings in psychology. What is more, every primary research article is basically a lab report. Therefore, if you want to develop an understanding of how lab reports should be written, it is a great idea to regularly read journal articles.

You might also want to go over the section “Reading the Research” in Chapter 2 of Beth’s book again before starting the activity. I completely agree with everything Beth says, but would like to take up the cudgels for the method section, which in my view is the most under-appreciated of all article sections. If you really want to understand what happened in a study, read the method section. If it is a well-written method section, it will provide you the deepest insights into what the researchers actually did.

The article you are about to read (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016) is about the flanker interference effect. Note that there is a twist in how this article uses the flanker task: The flankers are either letters or numbers. Critically, some flankers are ambiguous: They could be either numbers or letters (e.g., O could be the number 0 or the letter O). Avital-Cohen and Tsal show that these ambiguous stimuli only elicit an interference effect if participants interpret them as letters.

This result is interesting because it is often believed that interference effects are automatic (i.e., they are not under voluntary control). Alternatively, one could say that researchers often believe these effects are a consequence of bottom-up processing (i.e., what happens is determined by the stimulus, not by your goals or the task instructions). On the contrary, Avital-Cohen and Tsal’s results show that top-down processing does influence the interference effect in the letter flanker task. This article is also a great example of how classic tasks can still be used to gain new insights!


Before you start reading the article:

Activity

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:

  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. Make sure you agree on one answer per question.

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