Suggestions Neural Navigators

[RemonNicolai]

Time Pressure Setup & Visual Signal:

• Define "too much" pressure: Since individual tolerance for pressure varies, it’s important to assess how much pressure participants feel during the task. Adding a self-report measure will allow you to understand individual differences in perceived pressure and whether the time limit is too strict for some participants. You could also adjust the time limit based on their responses, which may improve the experimental design by making it more personalized and accurate.
• Effect of visual signals on pressure: Using a time bar instead of a digital countdown can reduce cognitive distraction, especially for participants with ADHD, who often have difficulties with time perception and sustained attention. However, the presence of any visual signal (like a time bar or countdown) may itself add pressure. Testing whether removing visual signals changes participants' stress levels or performance would give insight into whether time awareness affects pressure. If participants perform better without a visual indicator, this could suggest that the signal adds unnecessary stress.

Interface Design for ADHD Users:

• Simplicity in time-sensitive tasks: ADHD participants may struggle more with processing time-sensitive information due to documented difficulties with attention and time perception. Therefore, simplifying the interface with a time bar rather than a digital countdown could mitigate these distractions. By making the task interface less cluttered, it may help participants focus more on the task itself rather than feeling anxious about the ticking clock.

Hypotheses on Time Pressure and ADHD:

• Competing hypotheses: ADHD participants may respond differently to time pressure. Some may experience performance declines due to stress, while others may focus better when under pressure. This dual possibility suggests it is important to develop clear predictions about which factors (e.g., ADHD severity, baseline cognitive abilities) might influence whether performance improves or declines under pressure.
• Baseline cognitive abilities and ADHD severity: ADHD is not a uniform diagnosis; severity and symptoms vary. By accounting for baseline cognitive abilities (like attention span or working memory) and ADHD severity, you can predict which participants may benefit or struggle under time pressure, offering more nuanced results.

Experimental Design:

• Remove word frequency tracking: Tracking how often a word has been encountered may complicate the design and make it harder to isolate the effects of time pressure. It’s unclear what additional value this would bring, given that the spacing model probably already manages word repetition (either implicit or explicit). Adding this element might make it harder to disentangle the primary focus of the study.
• Integrate time pressure into the user model: It's unclear how time pressure is integrated into the algorithm or user model. You should clarify the mechanics of how time pressure influences the learning process within the system to make your methodology more transparent.

Measuring Performance:

• Clarify performance metrics: How you measure performance (reaction time, accuracy, etc.) across the time pressure and control conditions needs to be clearly defined. This will allow for a better comparison between the two conditions and help assess the overall impact of time pressure on participants.

Participant Design:

• Within-subject design: Since finding a large number of participants might be challenging, consider having all participants go through both time pressure and control conditions. This will provide a within-subject comparison and improve statistical power, allowing you to observe how the same individuals perform across conditions, reducing variability due to individual differences.

ADHD Severity as a Continuous Variable:

• ADHD as a spectrum: Rather than classifying participants as having ADHD or not based on a cutoff score (e.g., "above 14 points"), use the ADHD score as a continuous variable. This allows for a more detailed analysis of how ADHD symptom severity (0-24) affects performance (e.g., reaction time or accuracy). It can also show how ADHD severity interacts with pressure, providing a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between attention deficits and task performance. Instead of a simple yes/no distinction, you can plot ADHD scores against performance metrics under both pressure and control conditions to see how severity influences outcomes.

[sorinadev]

First, thank you so much for your insightful comment! You’ve brought up some excellent points that align with the direction we are heading.

1. Time pressure setup & visual signal:

• Defining "too much" pressure: You’re absolutely right - individual tolerance for pressure varies widely. We are still exploring the literature to understand better when time pressure crosses the line into being "too much" for most people, which leads to stress. We agree that adding a self-report measure will help capture participants' personal experiences during the task. We plan to use a post-questionnaire to give us valuable insights into how each individual perceives the pressure, especially when it comes to the display of strict time limits. We’re also considering ways to modify the time limits and plan to adapt them so participants have enough room to process the task, recall their answers, type them out, and not feel overly rushed by the time bar.

• Effect of visual signals on pressure: You make a great point about the potential cognitive distraction of visual cues, particularly for participants with ADHD. For that reason, we’ll be conducting an experimental comparison between two conditions—one with the time bar and one without—to see how its presence affects performance and stress levels. The countdown idea was discharged due to its high potential of acting as a central distractor from the task.

2. Interface Design for ADHD users:

• We completely agree! By minimizing clutter and shifting the focus away from the ticking clock, we hope to help them concentrate more on the task itself rather than the pressure of time.

3. Hypotheses on Time pressure and ADHD:

• You raised an important point! We fully recognize the variability in ADHD severity and symptoms, which is why we plan to take steps to better understand our participants. While we can’t provide formal diagnoses, we will conduct an initial screening to identify those likely to have ADHD. However, for those participants who do not have an official diagnosis, it would be hard, if not nearly impossible, to determine their cognitive abilities and ADHD types.

• We’re also planning to include at least two officially diagnosed ADHD participants and will gather more detailed insights from them through a separate questionnaire. In this questionnaire, we plan to ask them about factors like ADHD type (inattentive and distractable, impulsive/hyperactive, combined), medication use (if any), therapeutic experiences (meditation, CBT, counseling, etc.), age of diagnosis (child, adolescence, young adult, adult, etc.), + others. As you suggested, we think those insights should help add nuance to our findings.

4. Experimental Design:

• Good point! Indeed, word frequency tracking could be redundant for our current study. However, we are curious to compare if there’s a difference in the number of words the participants manage to learn in the two conditions. For example, do participants in the time pressure condition have to revisit the learned words more often (because the time pressure actually inhibited their learning)?

• Agreed! As discussed with the professor this week, we plan to make use of the user model to track the users’ reaction speed. We are also implementing an adaptation to the time limit, as mentioned before, to account for the familiarization with the task, recalling the answer, typing it, and the potential distraction of the time bar. This time limit is still to be determined by current literature (although very scarce) and intuition. For now, we are considering setting it as x2 the standard RT.

5. Measuring performance:

• Indeed, we plan to measure both reaction time and accuracy across both conditions to assess how time pressure impacts performance. Accuracy will be measured by evaluating the percentage of correct responses participants provide during the task. This will help us see how well participants can perform under pressure in terms of giving correct answers. For reaction time, we will track the time it takes for participants to submit their responses after the task is presented, from the moment the prompt appears to the moment they hit "submit." We are also considering tracking the moment they start typing time. We think this could help us better estimate their time to recall the word since they saw the task and started typing.

6. Participant Design:

• Exactly! We plan to structure our experiment as a within-subject design for the reasons you mentioned, especially given our low participant expectations.

• The experiment will consist of a 5-minute session with the time bar and a 5-minute session without the time bar. Each participant will go through both conditions, one after the other. However, the words present in the sessions will be completely different. Additionally, if possible (depending on the participant’s time availability), we aim to conduct a recall session 24 hours later to assess how well participants remember the words they learned. This recall test will provide further insight into the lasting effects of time pressure on memory retention. The 5-minute timeline was set to not discourage participants from joining our study due to its length (a typical slimpstampen session lasts 8 minutes. Which would result in a 16 minutes long experiment and an additional 8-16 min recall session.), but still enough for them to familiarize with some words and learn them.

7. ADHD Severity as a Continuous Variable:

• This can absolutely be implemented during a post-experiment statistical analysis. However, it is worth noting that the test used, does not measure the “intesity” of the ADHD, but rather looks into potential “symptoms”, behavioural patterns that may entail the participant is likely to have the disorder. You can check out the testing method here: https://embrace-autism.com/asrs-5/#Scoring. The website also lists the research behind the short quiz and its accuracy: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.0298.

• Furthermore, the spectrum nature of ADHD refers to the fact that people with ADHD may have a combination of symptoms related to inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Still, the intensity and combination of these symptoms differ from person to person and cannot be encompassed by this simple and brief testing method. A professional assessment would be needed for such a diagnosis.