- Title
- Sequential effects in human performance
- Creator
- Williams, Paul
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- In this thesis I explore the influence of the recent past on future human performance. That is, how does an event or outcome that occurs at point A influence performance at point B, if at all? The theoretical topics and statistical methods are therefore sequential in nature. I explore two aspects of human performance under this general framework. In the first section, comprising three chapters, I develop and employ a novel paradigm to explore basic cognition. The development of the paradigm is documented in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, before Chapter 3 ultimately applies the paradigm to explore the hot hand belief and post-error slowing. The hot hand belief is the belief that the probability of a success given recent success will be greater than the probability of a hit given recent failure (Gilovitch, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985). Posterror slowing describes systematic increases in response time (RT) following errors in rapid choice tasks (Laming, 1968; Rabbitt, 1966). We investigate the hot hand and post-error slowing simultaneously, noting that both of these research areas had moved toward appraising the sequential influence of success and failure on dual performance dimensions: accuracy and RT (post-error slowing), or accuracy and difficulty (hot hand). We observed no post-error slowing for paid participants, and systematic posterror speeding for unpaid participants. Thus, we provide evidence for the newly emerging hypothesis that post-error slowing is not ubiquitous, but rather task and situation dependent. When post-error speeding was observed, we also observed the rarely documented hot hand effect, suggesting the hot hand may be more prevalent in low motivation contexts. In the second section, also comprising three chapters, I explore clinical applications of sequential methodologies. In Chapter 4 I document the best practice design of the emotional Stroop task (Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996) - a well-established paradigm used to explore the impact of emotional stimuli on human performance. In Chapters 5 and 6 I go on to explore sequential effects in this task for participants with and without symptoms of depression. In Chapter 5 I explore whether or not the presentation of an emotional word impacts performance on only the current trial (fast effect), or also on a subsequent trial (slow effect). Unlike previous efforts, we found no evidence of a slow effect in our data. In Chapter 6, we explore post-error slowing in the emotional Stroop task. Post-error slowing is a benchmark effect for cognitive control, which is the ongoing monitoring and regulation of actions and performance. We document that major depression symptoms are linked to severe deficits in cognitive control following errors and that these deficits are specific for emotional and non-emotional stimuli. These findings help constrain existing theories of error detection and correction, offer insights into the cognitive processes underpinning depression, and suggest that under emotional priming, major depression is marked by a complete failure to adapt behaviour in response to relevant environmental feedback.
- Subject
- post-error slowing; human performance; cognition; thesis by publication
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1336117
- Identifier
- uon:27550
- Rights
- Copyright 2017 Paul Williams
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 5 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 246 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |