Behavior Research Methods

Journal: Behavior Research Methods

Abbreviation

Behav Res Methods

Publisher

Springer

ISSN

1554-351X
1554-3528

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Publications 1 - 10 of 13

Measuring naturalistic proximity as a window into caregiver–child interaction patterns
Salo, Virginia C.; Pannuto, Pat; Hedgecock, William; et al. (2022)
Behavior Research Methods
The interactions most supportive of positive child development take place in moments of close contact with others. In the earliest years of life, a child’s caregivers are the primary partners in these important interactions. Little is known about the patterns of real-life physical interactions between children and their caregivers, in part due to an inability to measure these interactions as they occur in real time. We have developed a wearable, infrastructure-free device (TotTag) used to dynamically and unobtrusively measure physical proximity between children and caregivers in real time. We present a case-study illustration of the TotTag with data collected over two (12-hour) days each from two families: a family of four (30-month-old son, 61-month-old daughter, 37-year-old father, 37-year-old mother), and a family of three (12-month-old daughter, 35-year-old-father, 33-year-old mother). We explored patterns of proximity within each parent–child dyad and whether close proximity would indicate periods in which increased opportunity for developmentally critical interactions occur. Each child also wore a widely used wearable audio recording device (LENA) to collect time-synced linguistic input. Descriptive analyses reveal wide variability in caregiver–child proximity both within and across dyads, and that the amount of time spent in close proximity with a caregiver is associated with the number of adult words and conversational turns to which a child was exposed. This suggests that variations in proximity are linked to—though, critically, not synonymous with—the quantity of a child’s exposure to adult language. Potential implications for deepening the understanding of early caregiver–child interactions are discussed.
Careless responding detection revisited: Accuracy of direct and indirect measures
Goldammer, Philippe; Stöckli, Peter Lucas; Escher, Yannik Andrea; et al. (2024)
Behavior Research Methods
To screen for careless responding, researchers have a choice between several direct measures (i.e., bogus items, requiring the respondent to choose a specific answer) and indirect measures (i.e., unobtrusive post hoc indices). Given the dearth of research in the area, we examined how well direct and indirect indices perform relative to each other. In five experimental studies, we investigated whether the detection rates of the measures are affected by contextual factors: severity of the careless response pattern, type of item keying, and type of item presentation. We fully controlled the information environment by experimentally inducing careless response sets under a variety of contextual conditions. In Studies 1 and 2, participants rated the personality of an actor that presented himself in a 5-min-long videotaped speech. In Studies 3, 4, and 5, participants had to rate their own personality across two measurements. With the exception of maximum longstring, intra-individual response variability, and individual contribution to model misfit, all examined indirect indices performed better than chance in most of the examined conditions. Moreover, indirect indices had detection rates as good as and, in many cases, better than the detection rates of direct measures. We therefore encourage researchers to use indirect indices, especially within-person consistency indices, instead of direct measures.
Contact-free measurement of heart rate, respiration rate, and body movements during sleep
Brink, Mark; Müller, Christopher H.; Schierz, Christoph (2006)
Behavior Research Methods
A comparison of conventional and resampled personal reliability in detecting careless responding
Goldammer, Philippe; Stöckli, Peter Lucas; Annen, Hubert; et al. (2024)
Behavior Research Methods
Detecting careless responding in survey data is important to ensure the credibility of study findings. Of several available detection methods, personal reliability (PR) is one of the best-performing indices. Curran, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 66, 4-19, (2016) proposed a resampled version of personal reliability (RPR). Compared to the conventional PR or even–odd consistency, in which just one set of scale halves is used, RPR is based on repeated calculation of PR across several randomly rearranged sets of scale halves. RPR should therefore be less affected than PR by random errors that may occur when a specific set of scale half pairings is used for the PR calculation. In theory, RPR should outperform PR, but it remains unclear whether it in fact does, and under what conditions the potential gain in detection accuracy is the most pronounced. We conducted two studies: a simulation study examined the performance of the conventional PR and RPR in detecting simulated careless responding, and a real data example study analyzed their performance when detecting human-generated careless responding. In both studies, RPR turned out to be a significantly better careless response indicator than PR. The results also revealed that using 25 resamples for the RPR computation is sufficient to obtain the expected gain in detection accuracy over the conventional PR. We therefore recommend using RPR instead of the conventional PR when screening questionnaire data for careless responding.
Value-based decision-making battery: A Bayesian adaptive approach to assess impulsive and risky behavior
Pooseh, Shakoor; Bernhardt, Nadine; Guevara, Alvaro; et al. (2018)
Behavior Research Methods
An algorithmic approach to determine expertise development using object-related gaze pattern sequences
Wang, Felix S.; Gianduzzo, Céline; Meboldt, Mirko; et al. (2022)
Behavior Research Methods
Eye tracking (ET) technology is increasingly utilized to quantify visual behavior in the study of the development of domainspecific expertise. However, the identification and measurement of distinct gaze patterns using traditional ET metrics has been challenging, and the insights gained shown to be inconclusive about the nature of expert gaze behavior. In this article, we introduce an algorithmic approach for the extraction of object-related gaze sequences and determine task-related expertise by investigating the development of gaze sequence patterns during a multi-trial study of a simplified airplane assembly task. We demonstrate the algorithm in a study where novice (n = 28) and expert (n = 2) eye movements were recorded in successive trials (n = 8), allowing us to verify whether similar patterns develop with increasing expertise. In the proposed approach, AOI sequences were transformed to string representation and processed using the k-mer method, a well-known method from the field of computational biology. Our results for expertise development suggest that basic tendencies are visible in traditional ET metrics, such as the fixation duration, but are much more evident for k-mers of k > 2. With increased on-task experience, the appearance of expert k-mer patterns in novice gaze sequences was shown to increase significantly (p < 0.001). The results illustrate that the multi-trial k-mer approach is suitable for revealing specific cognitive processes and can quantify learning progress using gaze patterns that include both spatial and temporal information, which could provide a valuable tool for novice training and expert assessment.
Comparing Likert and visual analogue scales in ecological momentary assessment
Haslbeck, Jonas M.B.; Martínez, Alberto Jover; Roefs, Anne J.; et al. (2025)
Behavior Research Methods
Measuring subjective experiences in ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies has become pervasive in psychological science. A design choice that has to be made in all of these studies is which response scale to use. However, to date there is little guidance on this choice in the context of EMA. As a first step towards understanding the effects of different response scales, we experimentally vary the response scale and assess whether the resulting time series of subjective experiences are systematically different. We conducted a between-person experiment comparing a seven-point Likert scale (n = 63) with a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS; n = 56) in an EMA study measuring affective states over 14 days. Using Bayesian multilevel models, we found that the VAS resulted in moderately higher within-person item means, lag-0 correlations, lag-1 autocorrelations, as well as lower within-person skewnesses and response frequencies of exact zeros. We found the largest difference in correlations with external criteria related to psychopathology, where correlations for the VAS were much higher. We did not observe reliable differences in within-person item variances, root mean squared successive differences, missing data, duration of measurements, and ratings about the experiences with the EMA survey. Apart from higher within-person means and higher correlations with external criteria in the VAS group, the differences were relatively small. While more research on response scales in EMA is needed, based on our results we conclude that the VAS should be preferred in studies aiming at capturing affective states relating to general psychopathology, as well as for items whose variation occurs close to scale limits. We conclude by discussing how our findings may contribute to a larger research agenda that addresses the fit of different response scales for different research aims.
The rippling dynamics of valenced messages in naturalistic youth chat
Frey, Seth; Donnay, Karsten; Helbing, Dirk; et al. (2019)
Behavior Research Methods
The effect of sampling rate and lowpass filters on saccades – A modeling approach
Mack, David J.; Belfanti, Sandro; Schwarz, Urs (2017)
Behavior Research Methods
The study of eye movements has become popular in many fields of science. However, using the preprocessed output of an eye tracker without scrutiny can lead to low-quality or even erroneous data. For example, the sampling rate of the eye tracker influences saccadic peak velocity, while inadequate filters fail to suppress noise or introduce artifacts. Despite previously published guiding values, most filter choices still seem motivated by a trial-and-error approach, and a thorough analysis of filter effects is missing. Therefore, we developed a simple and easy-to-use saccade model that incorporates measured amplitude-velocity main sequences and produces saccades with a similar frequency content to real saccades. We also derived a velocity divergence measure to rate deviations between velocity profiles. In total, we simulated 155 saccades ranging from 0.5° to 60° and subjected them to different sampling rates, noise compositions, and various filter settings. The final goal was to compile a list with the best filter settings for each of these conditions. Replicating previous findings, we observed reduced peak velocities at lower sampling rates. However, this effect was highly non-linear over amplitudes and increasingly stronger for smaller saccades. Interpolating the data to a higher sampling rate significantly reduced this effect. We hope that our model and the velocity divergence measure will be used to provide a quickly accessible ground truth without the need for recording and manually labeling saccades. The comprehensive list of filters allows one to choose the correct filter for analyzing saccade data without resorting to trial-and-error methods.
nodeGame: Real-time, synchronous, online experiments in the browser
Balietti, Stefano (2017)
Behavior Research Methods

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