Honeycomb: a template for reproducible psychophysiological tasks for clinic, laboratory, and home use

Objective: To improve the ability of psychiatry researchers to build, deploy, maintain, reproduce, and share their own psychophysiological tasks. Psychophysiological tasks are a useful tool for studying human behavior driven by mental processes such as cognitive control, reward evaluation, and learning. Neural mechanisms during behavioral tasks are often studied via simultaneous electrophysiological recordings. Popular online platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Prolific enable deployment of tasks to numerous participants simultaneously. However, there is currently no task-creation framework available for flexibly deploying tasks both online and during simultaneous electrophysiology. Methods: We developed a task creation template, termed Honeycomb, that standardizes best practices for building jsPsych-based tasks. Honeycomb offers continuous deployment configurations for seamless transition between use in research settings and at home. Further, we have curated a public library, termed BeeHive, of ready-to-use tasks. Results: We demonstrate the benefits of using Honeycomb tasks with a participant in an ongoing study of deep brain stimulation for obsessive compulsive disorder, who completed repeated tasks both in the clinic and at home. Conclusion: Honeycomb enables researchers to deploy tasks online, in clinic, and at home in more ecologically valid environments and during concurrent electrophysiology.

Honeycomb: a template for reproducible psychophysiological tasks for clinic, laboratory, and home use.

OBJECTIVE: To improve the ability of psychiatry researchers to build, deploy, maintain, reproduce, and share their own psychophysiological tasks. Psychophysiological tasks are a useful tool for studying human behavior driven by mental processes such as cognitive control, reward evaluation, and learning. Neural mechanisms during behavioral tasks are often studied via simultaneous electrophysiological recordings. Popular online platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Prolific enable deployment of tasks to numerous participants simultaneously. However, there is currently no task-creation framework available for flexibly deploying tasks both online and during simultaneous electrophysiology. METHODS: We developed a task creation template, termed Honeycomb, that standardizes best practices for building jsPsych-based tasks. Honeycomb offers continuous deployment configurations for seamless transition between use in research settings and at home. Further, we have curated a public library, termed BeeHive, of ready-to-use tasks. RESULTS: We demonstrate the benefits of using Honeycomb tasks with a participant in an ongoing study of deep brain stimulation for obsessive compulsive disorder, who completed repeated tasks both in the clinic and at home. CONCLUSION: Honeycomb enables researchers to deploy tasks online, in clinic, and at home in more ecologically valid environments and during concurrent electrophysiology.

Web-Based Visualization of MeSH-Based PubMed/MEDLINE Statistics.

Statistical analysis of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) descriptors to improve biomedical literature search is an active research area. Existing tools have limited interactive visualizations that are accessible to researchers investigating how their hypotheses compare to trends in the research literature. We present a web application that computes and provides an interactive visualization of basic frequencies and co-occurrence statistics of MeSH descriptors associated with a PubMed query.

Experimental evidence for a pure collaboration effect.

What makes us willing to sacrifice our own self-interest for another person? Humans can forgo short-term individual gain to achieve long-term benefits1-4-but long-run self-interest cannot fully explain unselfish behaviour5. Collaboration in our evolutionary past may have played a role in shaping an innate human sense of distributive justice6, influencing who we consider deserving of our aid or generosity. Previous research has not been able to isolate this response to collaboration as an independent effect, distinct from other motivations to share7,8. Here we present evidence of a pure collaboration effect, distinct from motivations of future reciprocity, in-group favouritism or concern for accountability. We demonstrate this effect among adult subjects in an economic setting, showing that the effect constitutes a psychological phenomenon with relevance for real-world social and political behaviour. This collaboration effect is substantial: it motivates sharing among people otherwise inclined to share nothing and increases the proportion of participants willing to give up half of their allotted money. We find evidence supporting our hypothesis that the collaboration effect operates by creating a sense of debt owed to one's collaborator.

Chocolate scents and product sales: a randomized controlled trial in a Canadian bookstore and café.

We report the results of a 31-day trial on the effects of chocolate scent on purchasing behavior in a bookstore. Our study replicates and extends a 10-day randomized controlled trial in order to examine the generalizability of the original finding. We first introduce the study of store atmospherics and highlight the importance and dearth of replication in this area. In the next section, we describe the original study and discuss the theory of ambient scent effects on product sales, and the role of scent-product congruity. We then describe our design and methods, followed by presentation and discussion of our results. We find no evidence that chocolate scent affects sales. These findings indicate the importance of replication in varied settings. Contextual factors and the choices available to customers may moderate the effects of ambient scent on purchasing behavior. Our study highlights the value of examining the generalizability of experimental findings, both for theory and practice.