Calculating the Decision Times Abstract This report is going to shed light on an experiment that was conducted in the

university to study the spatial attention of participants and the impact that congruency and the type of cue has on the attention and thus the decision making of the participants. For this purpose, congruent and cue type has been made the independent variables where as the response time to categorize the target letter is the dependant variables. The results have been carefully administered and calculated using statistical software in order to avoid as much errors as possible. The introduction section mentions the theory and presents the hypothesis where as the data analysis presents a discussion on the results that have been achieved using the mentioned research methodology. Introduction For many years when this world started focusing on knowledge, research and development and on knowing the reality behind the existence and the operations of objects and beings, the focus was on the physical and the philosophical studies and it was very long after that the social sciences were given their due respect. Psychology in fact turned out to surprise almost everybody with its importance and its impact on the over society and in the operational performance of a person as well as in the mal functions that the other sciences failed to explain. In the field of psychology itself then, the concepts of attentions, cues, congruency and stimuli have been widely studied however; the interesting thing here is the fact that the field is not saturated. The reason being simple but overwhelming! For billions of people in this world, there can be as many combinations and levels of attentions, cues, impact of congruency and

stimuli and that too dynamic in nature and therefore, there can never be a perfect research work for these concepts. Rizzo and Vecera (2003) studied spatial attention and said that attentional processes are those which protect a human being (or any animal for that case) from the overload of information and that attention is actually a selective process of the further processing of some external information while the others available are disregarded. Then, spatial attention is the process that involves the selection of a stimulus to pay attention on, on the basis of spatial location. The idea of research in regard to spatial attention can be many however; one important aspect of study can be the fact as to what features of space trigger or enhance the attention of a human being (since this lab report has been conducted on human beings). Another concept in the field of applicative and cognitive psychology is that of visual orienting. Visual orienting is actually the process of redirecting the gaze in the direction of a new location in the visual field. Two important areas which are studied in relation to target elicited saccade (which actually is the orientation of the saccadic eye movement that follows the emergence or the appearance of a new target in the vision field). The idea then is to link psychology to human brain activity for understanding and reinforcing the findings with the empirical and experimental evidence. Visual orienting then is highly related to the type of cue and Kartzner and Treue (2007) study that the vision cueing studies as well as the attention shift studies can be studied under the light of the nature of the cue that is provided to the participants of the experiment. For this purpose generally, symbolic cues for example arrows etc are used under the category of endogenous cues which are also known as the voluntary cues. Endogenous attention is typically involved in the voluntary orienting of attention to a particular event or spatial location, such as when you choose to attend to a particular person at a noisy cocktail party. On the other hand, flashing

stimuli, or peripheral cues are known as exogenous or automatic visual cues. Exogenous cues or involuntary orienting occurs when attention is reflexively shifted to the location of a sudden and unexpected peripheral event such as when a person calls your name at the same cocktail party. Another categorization of cues, both auditory and visual, can be done in the shape of predictive and non predictive cues. As the name implies, a predictive cue is one for which the participant in an experiment or a person in general is ready and prepared and has a certain reaction planned in mind. For example at a racing track, the sound of the shot is a predictive cue to which the mind has already prepared a reaction to run. On the other hand, a non predictive cue is one on which the person under question has not spent any significant time in planning the reaction and any reaction that might occur may actually be very reflexive in nature. The experiment done in the lab was performed to measure the response time, in micro seconds, by the participants to make the categorization of stimulus between T and L. The design and the overall methodology used for this experiment have been given below. Following were the hypotheses made for the two independent variables:
i) Ho: congruency would not lead to smaller response times in the arrow

cues HA: congruency would lead to smaller response times in the arrow cues

ii) Ho: congruency would lead to smaller response times in the voice cues

HA: congruency would not lead to smaller response times in the voice cues

iii) Ho: congruency would not lead to smaller response times in the word

cues HA: congruency would lead to smaller response times in the word cues

iv) Ho: Voice cue would not yield the fastest response time

HA: Voice cue would yield the fastest response time

Research Methodology The Design The following were the key independent variables i) The cue type (exogenous or endogenous): Arrow, word or Voice.
ii) Congruency: whether or not the cue matched to the previous cue in

direction (location of the cue). If the location was same then the cue was congruent and if not, then incongruent. The voice cue could differ in the context of male or female voice. In the arrow cues, the number of trails was 96 and half were congruent and the same were incongruent. The same held for the word cue (48 out of 96) and for the voice trials (96 out of 192). The occurrence of the type of trail was random. The procedure used was that participants (256 university students, not recorded for age and gender) were tested in a group setting with the initial fixation cross appearing for duration between 250ms and 1000 ms, so that the attention was oriented to the middle of the screen. The delay was made random in order to discourage anticipatory responses and thus, the resulting biases. The fixation cross then, was followed by either and arrow pointing to the left of the right, or a word, left or right shown in the middle of the screen for 200 ms or the word spoken left or right spoken on the headphones for 700ms. Then the target letter appeared (T or L) on the right or left of the screen and the participants were supposed to press the letter L or T on their keyboard with the response time being monitored. Before the analysis was conducted of the results, the trials with the reaction time greater than 1000 micro seconds were removed from the raw time and for the remaining the average decision time for each of the six trials were

calculated. Within the voice trials, average decision times for male natural, female natural, male opposite and female opposite trials were also calculated. The voice sample for the voice trials were collected from six males and six females. They were supposed to say left and right in the manner of giving an instruction. These samples were collected using a microphone connected to a laptop and the Praat software was utilized to change the acoustic properties of three males and three females voices so that their gender voice was switched to the opposite. The other tools used were the experiment builder software (SR Research, Ontario). Individual data after the experiment was collected into group spreadsheets. Results Looking at the relationship of the six trials to the response time taken for the decisions, it was found that the effect of congruency differed as a function of trial type. This mean that for the arrow trial, the function of congruency differed from that of the voice trial and the congruency function of them both differed from that of the word trial. For the same type of trial then, congruency was a function (generalizable). It was found that the arrow trials, participants were approximately 15 micro seconds faster in their decision making when the cue presented to them was congruent rather than incongruent. Statistically, the difference between the two was significant. For the arrow trial, the congruent cue produced an average response of 509.867 ms and the incongruent produced an average response of 525.52ms. In the case of the word cues, the difference between the congruent and the incongruent was small but significant and the participants were found to be around 3 ms faster in incongruent cue rather than the congruent one. Finally, there was no effect of cue congruency for the voice trials and the results came out to be almost the same. The data is shown in the graph below.

In the congruency controlled trials, participants were found to be fastest in the categorization of T and L on voice trials and the slowest on the word trials. As far as the results of the voice gender is concerned, on the impact of response time, in regard to the type i.e. natural vs. opposite, there was no significant impact of congruency found. However, there were overall differences in the response time. Participants were found to be 15 micro seconds faster in pressing T or L after deciding on female and male opposite trials than on male natural and female opposite trials. The graph for the response timings have been given as under,

Data Analysis As was predicted, the voice cues yielded the fastest responses. The hypothesis was made in relation to the hypothesis that the voice cues congruency would not yield smaller time owing to the assumption that the congruency factor in the voice cue would not play an important role. The voice will be heard almost alike for even the different voices as in for male or female voice change, it would not matter that which voice presented the cue in what order. Interestingly, the assumption was proven to be true by the experiment as well as the alternative hypothesis that the voice cue would yield the fastest response and that congruency would not lead to difference in response timing was accepted in the results. As far as the statistical evidence is concerned however, the t stat for the voice congruency was 0.783144 which was insignificant. The difference between the two independent variable this means statistically did not come out to be significant enough for us to reject the null hypothesis. For the other two types of trials, the congruency for statically significantly different in response time as compared to non congruency. As predicted and as shown by the second graph in the results section, the voice congruency did not influence the results much in the voice trials. The results that this experiment yielded were not similar to the ones that Waal et al (2010) founded for social learning which found out that female models influenced the social learning more than the male models. As far as visual cues are concerned, Posner (2010)

found out that the peripheral event, or the exogenous cue with high predictability resulted in more rapid eye detection than the low probability one. This idea matches with the congruency of visual results that this experiment (lab experiment) yielded that is, the participants were expecting congruent cue and thus, the detection and decision making was quicker.

References Kartzner, S. and Treue, S. (2006). Spatial and feature based effects of exogenous cueing on visual motion processing. Elsevier. Posner, M. (2010). Orientation of attention. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Vecera, S and Rizzo, M. (2003). Spatial Attention: normal processes and their breakdown. USA: Neurological clinics of America. Waal et al. (2010). Selective attention to philopatric models causes directed social learning in wild vervet monkeys. Proceeding of the royal societt