Hi everybody.
In my previous video, I was talking about
the first task in the Sequential Task Paradigm.
In this video, I will be talking about the second part.
In the first part, people are usually made fatigued (or not).
And the second part
is meant to actually measure people's performance
in controlling their own response tendencies.
I am going to give you some examples.
In this example, this is a task
where people had to do a series of puzzles.
These puzzles were line-drawing puzzles.
People got to see a figure, much like this
and it was their task to
trace the line in that figure without lifting their pen from the paper.
You might be familiar with this type of puzzle.
In the case of this puzzle it would work like this.
To give another example,
people would get this puzzle
and they would try and they would solve it.
So, after a while
people would be exposed to a puzzle
that actually seemed a bit more difficult.
For example, this one.
You can imagine that you could try this puzzle
and if it doesn't work out
you gonna try again
and maybe again, and maybe yet another time
but at some point you're going to find out that it's
you are going to basically give up
and everybody gives up on this particular puzzle
because it's actually impossible to solve, mathematically.
So what researchers used as a way to measure people's self-control
is the time they took to actually give up.
People higher in self-control you would expect
to try longer, to resist the urge to give up;
whereas people lower in self-control would give up sooner.
So I am going to show you a different example
as a task that is often used as the second task in the Sequential Task Paradigm
This one is called the multisource interference task.
In this task, people get exposed to
series of three digits at a time.
So, for example, these would be the strings of digits
people would get to see.
In this task, participants have to indicate
which of the three digits, is different from the other two.
They have to do this by using
their fingers that they put on the numerical part of a keyboard.
Much like this.
For example, for the top string, which is 1-0-0
the answer would be '1', so they would have to press '1'.
Now, you can see that for the blue
examples, on top, it's actually quite easy
because the position of the number is the same as the position of the finger (on the keyboard).
If they have to press 1, it's also the number on the left
that corresponds to their finger on the keyboard.
So for the red examples, you can see that it's a bit more difficult.
For example, for the first example, the first red one, 2-3-2
... the correct answer is 3, because that's the one that is different from the other two.
However, you might also have the impulse to press '2'
because '2' is in the middle, and 2 is also the middle finger on the keyboard.
The same goes for the next example, 3-1-1
The correct answer is 3, because that's the odd one out, the one that's different
One the other hand, it's on the finger associated with '1'
it's on the left.
So, people who do this task experience interference
and they have to deal with that.
So when people are fatigued
this often shows on this task in two ways.
First, people are slower on these red examples here.
You can imagine that; if they're fatigued, they're slower to come up with the correct response.
Second, also, they have bigger variability in their reaction times
basically, the distribution of reaction times is broader when people are fatigued.
I am going to show you one more procedure that is often used
as the second task in the sequential task paradigm.
This is an example from Hofmann.
In his work, he studies self-control
and, basically, the effect of self-control on food intake.
You can imagine that people low in self-control
have the tendency to eat nice food, even though this might be bad for their diet.
In this procedure, people would come into the laboratory
and they would get a full package of M&Ms.
They are told, in this procedure, that it is their task to
answer a couple of questions about these M&Ms,
about their taste, about their texture, etcetera, and they are told
that they can eat as many M&Ms from that package as they like.
Now, researchers are not so much interested, in this procedure, in
the answers to those questions, but they're more interested
in how many of the M&MS, from the package, people actually eat.
You can imagine that the score on this measure
so how many M&Ms people eat
is actually very much dependent on people's diet.
So people who care a lot about their diet,
are not going to eat so many M&Ms.
Maybe only one or two, just to get the taste of them,
to be able to answer the questions about the M&Ms, but not more.
On the other hand, people who
do not care so much about their diet, might eat the entire package --
because why not?
So this is exactly what researchers find in the control condition,
so in people who are not so fatigued.
You see that on the figure that's now on the screen.
Now, in the control condition, those are the white boxes,
you see that there's indeed a relationship between those things
so people actually eat according to their diet.
People who don't diet, eat a lot. People who diet, eat less.
An interesting pattern of results emerged in the fatigue condition
so, people who were made fatigued in the
first task of the sequential task paradigm.
They actually did no longer eat
according to their diet.
whether or not they cared about their diet, they ate the same amount of M&Ms
So, the implication of this study was that
mental fatigue makes people care less about their long-term plans and goals.
So, we're getting close to the end.
In my previous video, I talked about the first part of the
Sequential Task Paradigm. So I talked about the ways
researchers can make participants fatigued.
In this video, I talked about the second part
of the Sequential Task Paradigm -- and that's
tasks that are used to measure people's self-control.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
I also hope you will watch the next one as well.
Thank you for watching.
