An Application of Confidence Rating for a Non-parametric Adaptive Procedure: A Weighted Up-down Procedure with Visual Analogue Scale
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Chin, Ching-Lan
Abstract
In the psychophysical research field, detection or discrimination thresholds can be estimated by non-parametric adaptive procedures. The two-alternative forced-choice paradigm is commonly used for the experiment. In this paradigm, participants have to choose the alternative that contains the target stimulus. Recently, some researchers conducted psychophysical experiments using non-parametric adaptive procedures that incorporate the confidence rating of responses from participants. The efficiency of thresholds and parameters estimations was enhanced by the confidence rating of responses (Kaernbach, 2001; Klein, 2001; Garcia-Perez, 2010).
In this thesis, the weighted up-down procedure, a non-parametric adaptive procedure, was used to conduct experiments. Two response tools - keyboard and visual analogue scale — and the confidence rating of two-, three-, and four-response options were used to collect responses, comparing the efficiency of discrimination threshold estimations among different options of the confidence rating. We also used a non-adaptive procedure to measure the thresholds and tested the consistency of threshold estimations between the non-adaptive and weighted up-down procedures.
To conclude, threshold estimations by the weighted up-down procedure were biased compared to the estimations by the non-adaptive procedure. And this result was consistent with previous simulation studies. The results in the weighted up-down procedure showed that tasks with three-, and four-response options were more efficient methods on estimating thresholds than the task with the two-response option. Moreover, threshold estimations by the visual analogue scale were inconsistent with those with keyboard, unless the former was incorporated with more response options of confidence rating.
Subjects
non-parametric adaptive procedure
weighted up-down procedure
visual analogue scale
discrimination threshold
Type
thesis
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