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, leaves from one tree were thin and curved whilst the leaves from the other tree were wide and straight. These differences are easy to spot but other categories of tree leaves are much harder to learn. Note, there were no trick categories! On each block of trials, all the leaves belonged to one or the other tree, and the leaves from the two trees did not overlap with each other. Also, the difference between the leaves from the two trees stayed the same throughout each block.
We are measuring how quickly you learn which leaves come from which trees. We do this by counting how many trials you take before you get fifteen 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:
- Some people see six leaves from one tree at the same time, whereas other people only see one leaf from a tree at a time. We want to know if it is easier to learn which leaves come from a given tree when more than one of its leaves is shown at once.
- Also, some people only see leaves from one tree at at the same time, whereas other people see leaves from both trees together. Is it easier to learn which leaves come from which trees if you see both types of leaves together, so that you can compare the leaves directly?
- Finally, for some categories that you learnt, all the leaves were shown at the same angle. Does this make it easier to learn, compared to when leaves were shown at all sorts of different angles?
If you have any comments or suggestions about this experiment, you can email me at rlawson@liv.ac.uk.
Once again, thanks very much for your help, Rebecca