Question: What cognitive tasks do you use in your research?

Sam Parsons answered on 19 Sep 2017:

Hi Sinclair, great question.

I guess that most of the tasks I use would technically come under the umbrella of ’emotion information-processing’ tasks.

One task that I have used a few times is the emotional dot-probe task. Basically participants are presented with a pair of words or images. In my tasks one is positive and one is negative. Then, when they are removed from the screen, a small (like 5 pixel) line is presented horizontally or vertically in either the same location as the positive or negative stimulus. I record how quickly people respond on both types of trials and create a bias index. This bias reflects how much more quickly people respond between the positive-location and negative-location trials and gives us an indication of preferential attention for positive relative-to negative images.

We can also modify the task to implicitly train people to have more of a positive attention bias, which might be related to wellbeing – at least that’s part of what I am exploring. the video below gives an impression of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVkPGkG7vZQ

I have also used these tasks, if you want to google them or ask me anything more specific about them; interpretation bias task, emotional internal switching task, coloured circle working memory task, emotion recognition task, self-referential encoding and memory task, visual search tasks.

I also often use self-reported measures or questionnaires that attempt to give us an idea of mental health, if you want to hear about any of those?

Feel free to follow up with any other questions! 🙂