First *THANKS* for completing this study. You probably found it a challenge but we really appreciate your effort!
Everyone who takes part does different conditions and so you may have found it easier or harder than other people depending on which conditions you were in. This was not an IQ test! We are not trying to compare how well individual people do. Instead, we are interested in how the different conditions you did affect how easy or hard the leaf categories are to learn.
We want to see how easily people learn about different aspects of the leaf shape so that they can correctly categorise the leaves. For instance, in the first (easy) set of trials, the good category of leaves were thin and curved whilst the bad category of leaves were wide and straight. These differences are easy to spot but other categories are much harder to learn. Note, there were no trick categories! All the leaves belonged to one or the other category, and the categories did not overlap with each other. Also, the difference between the good and bad categories stayed the same throughout each sub-experiment - it changed for each new sub-experiment.
We are measuring how quickly you learn the leaf categories. We do this by counting how many trials you take before you get ten decisions in a row all correct. As you went through the study, you could see how well you were doing by the ticks (when you got a trial right) at the bottom of the window. Here is what we are looking at:
- Different people are shown different number of leaves at the same time. We want to know if it is easier to learn the good from the bad leaves when more than one leaf is shown at once.
- Also, some people only see leaves from one category (either good or bad leaves) at the same time, whereas other people see both good and bad leaves together. Is it easier to learn the categories if you see both good and bad leaves together, so that you can compare them directly?
- Finally, for some categories that you learnt, all the leaves were shown at the same angle. Does this make it easier to learn the good from the bad leaves, compared to when leaves were shown at all sorts of different angles?
If you have any comments or suggestions about this experiment or if would like to get more information about your own results or the aims of the experiment, please tell us in the feedback box below. Remember to *SUBMIT* your feedback and leave your *EMAIL*ADDRESS* if you want a reply.
Once again, thanks for your help, Rachael and Rebecca