I'm wary of evolutionary psychology – a field that too often seems to be simplified in the media down to "women like pink and men like teenage girls because of science" – but, with caveats, it's interesting if not particularly scientific to speculate about what supernormal stimulus buttons Candy Crush Saga might be pressing.
As expected, most participants exhibited a high level of accuracy in the simple gender-judgment task but some (N = 4) did seem to have forgotten the stimulus-button contingencies over the time of the experiment, possibly because of the rare occurrence of target trials.
The patient performed the task on a computer running Windows XP Pro (Microsoft, Seattle, USA), equipped with a parallel output cable that delivered triggers to the LFP recording system at the onset of each visual stimulus and button press with millisecond precision.
Participants were required to press one of two buttons to indicate their response as 'yes' or 'no' to each stimulus, using a button box held in the right hand.
These can either be concrete, for example, when shown stimulus A press button 1, or abstract, for example, when shown a novel word press button 1 if it is in upper case and button 2 if it is in lower case.
The environment class, which contains and controls the sensory stimulus (and the button), is inspected periodically by the Sensory Memory module.
In contrast to previous studies, every stimulus required a button press to assure that participants attended to all items.
The subjects were instructed to count every stimulus, press a button when they reached 100 and then reset their count and restart counting from zero again.
RT was defined as the interval between stimulus onset and button press, reflecting the time that participants needed for reward evaluation and decision-making (forming and making a choice).
Mean reaction time (RT; time between stimulus onset and button press) and response accuracy (percent correct) for go and no-go trials during the second block of trials were computed.
In the Sternberg-paradigm, a distinction is made between decision time (DT), defined as the time between target stimulus onset and home button release, and movement time (MT), defined as the time between home button release and pressing the target button.
