In this episode of All Things Cognition, I interviewed Caitlin Sisk (pictured below). Caitlin took a break from wedding celebrations in Cape Cod to tell me about the research she and co-authors published recently in the Psychonomic Society journal, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI). To be clear, she was attending the wedding, not a star of the show. She said about the wedding, “…was a great way to celebrate defending my dissertation just a week before!” Caitlin conducted the research while she was a graduate student. She has a postdoctoral fellowship to investigate attention in infants.
Back to the research. COVID weighed heavily on a lot of minds while we tried to navigate our way through the pandemic. Do concerns about COVID impact our ability to pay attention? Hear all about the paper and a bit about preregistration in the interview (and/or) read the transcripts below.
Transcription
Intro
Myers: You’re listening to all things, cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. Now here is your host, Laura Mickes.
Intro to the interview with Caitlin Sisk
Mickes: In the upcoming interview. Caitlin Sisk (@caitlin_sisk) talks about hers and her colleagues’ paper published in the Psychonomic Society journal, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications [CRPI]. The paper is called “Impact of active and latent concerns about COVID 19 on attention.” See if you have any task-unrelated unrelated thoughts while listening. Here goes.
Interview with Caitlin Sisk
Mickes: Hi, Caitlin. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me about your research published in CRPI.
Sisk: Thank you. Thank you.
Mickes: COVID was on everyone’s minds and increasingly so, as we realized it wasn’t just a problem in Wuhan that it was gonna be much, much bigger. And so this focus on COVID may distract us from doing other things. And what you did was you investigated the impact that COVID has on different components of attention. I usually ask some standard questions. And if you don’t mind, could you tell us the background to the research?
Sisk: Yeah, of course we kind of devised this plan in summer of 2020 when we were sitting around and we were all feeling a bit of unease related to COVID. We were feeling a bit more anxious than usual. And ourselves and a lot of other people that we spoke to were reporting difficulty focusing and both these emotional consequences of the pandemic and these kinds of attention-related things that coincided at least with, with these emotional changes that came with this sense of uncertainty and, and general anxiety surrounding both the health impacts of the pandemic and the financial impacts as well. So there was more than just the concerns about will I, or someone I love get COVID and have negative effects of that, but there was also changes in job opportunities, working hours, that kind of a thing. And so in general, people seemed to be quite anxious about the pandemic specifically. Yeah.
Mickes: Who were “we” that you talk about? These were your co-authors?
Sisk: Yeah.
Mickes: Who were your co-authors?
Sisk: Yi Ni Toh, Jihyang Jun, Roger Remington, and Vanessa Lee.
Mickes: You were all sitting around going, so what can we do about it?
Sisk: Yeah, we were really fascinated by these changes that people were reporting both in their emotional states, these prolonged emotional states, and in various attention-related tasks, focusing on work, paying attention to lectures, that kind of a thing. And so we, we know that emotions can affect attention. So there are various well-reported, well-established, well-replicated effects of attention that when you use emotional stimuli, the effects go away. Or there’s, you know, for instance, the weapons focus effect where if there’s a gun in an image or in a, in a scene, you tend to pay attention only to that. And not even to other important stimuli, like the face of the person holding the gun. So we know that emotions can kind of modulate attention, but there are some inconsistencies in how more prolonged emotional states – like anxiety – can influence more of acute tasks. So when you’re trying to complete a specific task, is that going to be influenced by an increase in general feelings of unease and anxiety surrounding the pandemic?
And the other reason that this of course is interesting to us as attention researchers, is we know that attention is so important in so many daily tasks, not just work. Obviously, that’s what a lot of people think of when they think about attention, but even things like driving to work, which is something we do on a regular basis. But the costs of not paying attention at the right moments while driving are often quite high or can be quite high. And so it’s really important to, to know if there is this general increase in feelings of anxiety in the pandemic. And it seems like there have been those. Is that also influencing attention because even if the influence is small, if everyone’s experiencing these changes, the overall impact could be quite large. We wanna know are people getting in car accidents more often because they’re worried about COVID?
Mickes: Right. You asked people a bunch of questions about their thoughts and maybe feelings about COVID.
Sisk: mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Mickes: and then you had them engage in four different attention tasks. Is that the essence?
Sisk: Yes. So participants all completed a survey where we asked both about health concerns related to COVID, financial concerns related to COVID, and kind of general anxiety level. So we use the STAI-6 score, which is a state anxiety measure to just measure general anxiety in the moment not related to COVID specifically. So we measure both COVID concerns and general concerns. And we also asked a few other questions about, you know, social distancing behavior, washing hands, wearing masks, that kind of a thing.
Mickes: I’m gonna chime in here and give…
Sisk: yeah.
Mickes: …examples of the questions you asked. So the item category was a health-related concern. Like you said,
Sisk: mm-hmm, <affirmative>
Mickes: a content item would be, “I, or people I love may get sick from COVID-19. And then a finance-related concern would be, I may lose my job due to COVID 19.” Those are the types of questions you asked, and then you had them do the attention tests. Is that right?
Sisk: Yes. Yes. So they took the survey and then they completed four attention tasks. Each one was designed to test a different component of attention. And then after each of the attention tasks, they reported the percentage of time during that task, they had spent thinking about something unrelated to the task. So this was a measure of what we consider “active concern.” Then at the end of all of the tasks, we asked them to report the percentage of time during all of the tasks they’d spent thinking about COVID specifically.
Mickes: In terms of the tasks that they did, you were looking at different components of attention. Will you tell me what those components were? And then what were the tasks that measured each one, maybe take them one at a time.
Sisk: Sure. All participants completed a search task, which measures selective attention or search-related attention. So in that task, they were searching for a target letter T among distractor letter LS, and they had to report the color black or white of the T as quickly and accurately as possible. So there we were measuring reaction time and accuracy, uh, but focusing mostly on reaction time.
Mickes: Great. And then what was the next one?
Sisk: And then we measured a capacity-related component of attention using a visual working memory task. So participants were shown five colored squares on the screen, and they had to memorize the colors of those squares. After a short interval, those squares disappeared. And then after a short interval, they were shown a test array where one of these squares had changed colors and they had to identify by clicking on it, which square had changed color. And there we’re measuring accuracy.
Mickes: Okay. That’s your working memory measure.
Sisk: So that would be working memory or the capacity component of attention.
Mickes: Okay.
Sisk: And then we measure sustained attention. Sustained attention is the ability to focus for a few minutes at a time on a relatively mundane task. To test sustained attention, we used what’s called the, the scene CPT, which is the continuous performance task. In that task, there was a stream of images presented quickly, one after another of cities and mountains. So you had frequent city images. It was about 90% of the images were city images. And you had to press a space bar in response to each city image. And every once in a while, one of these rare mountain images would show up and you had to avoid pressing the space bar in response to the mountain images.
Mickes: We have one more task,
Sisk: One more task.
Mickes: Yea.
Sisk: yes.
Mickes: What is that?
Sisk: And so the other task is a measure of cognitive control. And so in that task, we called it the task switching task. It was derived from a previous study. In this task, participants were shown shapes and they had to press an arrow key according to the location of the shape. And there were two types of shapes. There were filled shapes. Those are kind of the compatible setting. And in response to those participants had to press the arrow key corresponding to the location of that shape. So if the shape appeared on the left of the screen, they would press the left arrow key. And then there were outline shapes. And in response to those incompatible shapes, you had to press the arrow key corresponding to the opposite of the location of the shape, right? If the shape appears on the left and it’s an outline shape, you press the right arrow key. We’re measuring how good are they both at choosing the correct response, especially on those difficult incompatible trials, but how good are they also at switching from trial to trial, remembering the rule and applying it anew each trial. So that was the cognitive control component of attention.
Mickes: Alright. Back to the pre-registration.
Sisk: Yeah.
Mickes: This is gonna take us a little bit off course, but I also, I find it really interesting. I started doing pre-registration uh, years ago, obviously I’m further along in my career than you are, but did you start as an undergrad researcher doing pre-registrations or did you do it all throughout your graduate schooling?
Sisk: No, I didn’t start in undergrad, but I was aware of it. In graduate school, I initially didn’t really do any pre-registration. It was something that we picked up as a lab. I prepared a pre-registration. I don’t think that we actually submitted it, but kind of a practice pre-registration because I was doing some virtual reality research and because it’s much more difficult to collect data in that kind of study, anyways. We had to do a lot of planning ahead. And so we thought, why not preregister this, since we’re already planning ahead anyways, before we’re starting data collection, then we might as well preregister it. And, and kind of lock in our hypotheses at that point.
Mickes: So you have the similar experiences that a lot of us have where we started off not doing a pre-registration.
Sisk: mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Mickes: and then over to doing pre-registration. Do you feel it’s the right approach?
Sisk: Yeah. In general, I, I think that pre-registration is a really great approach. There’s been a bit of a learning curve in my experience in switching from non-preregistered research to preregistered research, because you’re kind of front loading, a lot of the thinking work.
Before we were preregistering our studies, we were able to collect data pretty quickly. And so we didn’t have to think that far ahead. We could kind of say, it’d be interesting to see what happens when we give people this task. Right. And so then we would give people that task, we’d see what happened. And we’d think about what that meant. I mean, we’d have hypotheses going into the data collection, but we didn’t have to do a huge amount of the work on the front end in terms of what are the reasons that we’re making each of these minute experimental decisions? What exactly are the analyses that are going to be most important for us to run?
That’s exactly my experience.
Yeah.
Mickes: I’d just motor right on through. Collect data, it’s gonna be fast, we know the analyses, we know what we’re …
Sisk: Right, exactly. Cause cause a lot of the time it’s the same kind of study that we’ve done before. And so just change a variable. We have an idea of what we think that the results will be when we change that variable, collect the data, see if that’s the case, right.
And with preregistration, it’s a lot more front-loaded where you are motivating the study. You are writing out essentially the method section of the paper, which is a lot of work, but it’s, it’s good work to do, especially in these, you know, when we started doing preregistration, these were studies where we had to do that work at that point anyways, because it was not the same exact kind of study we’d been running. And say exactly what analyses we’re going to run, which was a, a bit of a challenge in this specific study that we’re talking about today.
Just because this is a little bit outside of our wheelhouse in terms of looking at individual differences, looking at correlations between performance on attention tasks and survey measures. Surveys were new to us. When we started this study. It was a bit of a challenge planning out exactly what analyses were going to be important. And we had several analyses in the exploratory section of our preregistration because we thought, you know, these might be interesting to look at, but we don’t really have a prediction about what, what they’re going to tell us. Um, and we don’t think that it’s essential to our questions, but we collected all this data. We might as well preregister some exploratory analyses on that data.
Mickes: Thank you for sharing your experience about that.
Sisk: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Mickes: I, I really, I really now love the approach and it is a lot hard work upfront,
Sisk: mm-hmm <affirmative>,
Mickes: but it’s, it’s really worth it. Doing it has improved the way I do science.
Sisk: Yeah, I think so. And I, you know, I think that it has definitely because you’re having to actually write out what your methods are, why you’re making these different methodological choices. I find that we actually are more careful in the way we design studies and that that improves everything.
Each new preregistration, you learned a few things from the previous study that maybe you’re adjusting, um, in this new preregistration, but, but yeah, that’s been our experience. And like I said, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but as we’ve gone, it makes the writing of the paper much easier. The writing of the manuscript is much easier because the method section is done and a lot of the analysis plans are done. Even a lot of the intro is, is partially done.
Mickes: Exactly.
Sisk: So, so it’s not so much doing more work as just changing when you do it. And I think that it’s been generally a positive experience doing that work before you collect the data. And that means typically that the studies are better designed.
There are some frustrations still where we had pre-registered Pearson’s correlations for all of the correlations that we were going to do. But when we actually got the data, the task-unrelated thought measures were heavily skewed. So we had to do Spearman’s correlations when we were correlating with the task-unrelated thought measures, there
Mickes: Did you feel too constricted then by that preregistration?
Sisk: In that specific case, no, because it was an easily justified.
Mickes: yes.
Sisk: Change. Um, given that our data didn’t meet the criteria for a Pearson’s correlation, right. We had to switch to be responsible researchers. But there were a few things where, you know, we would have certain measures or things that when it came time to analyze the data, when we were looking at the data, we thought, oh, it would’ve been better to look at it this other way. So there were some areas where it felt like, hmm, it would’ve been nice to do this, but there is always room, as long as you acknowledge that, it’s not what you preregistered. You can still report these and you, and you can mention why you think that it’s justified to add this extra analysis to the preregistered plan or something like that.
Mickes: Right. You’re not so super tied to it.
Sisk: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Mickes: All right. Before we get too deep into preregister.
Sisk: sure <laugh>,
Mickes: Let’s get back to your research because I think where we left was you gave, uh, beautiful descriptions of these tasks. I suppose I should ask you what you found.
Sisk: Yeah. There were really a couple of questions that we were interested in looking at. One was whether any component of attention is affected by any kind of concern at all. Cause it’s possible that the kind of prolonged states of emotion, like, the anxiety surrounding the pandemic are not going to influence performance on a relatively acute task. So, you know, you’re giving someone a task that lasts a couple of minutes. They might be able to focus for those couple of minutes and have concerns not influence performance at all. So, so one of our questions was whether concerns are going to influence any component of attention. The other question is diving deeper into that and saying are some components of attention more sensitive to the effects of concerns than others. And what can that tell then about both the components of attention and their relationships to each other, and, and also about what kinds of real-world tasks are likely to be impacted?
You know, maybe you’re not going to be worse at finding your keys in the morning, but you’re going to be worse at driving. And that’s a good thing to know. So that was one of our questions.
And we also wanted to look deeper into a question that had come up in our previous paper on sustained attention about the difference between active and latent concerns. You can think of this as latent concerns are concerns that if I ask you, if it’s something you’re concerned about, you would say, yes, it is. So, you know, if I say, are, are you concerned about climate change? You might say, yeah, generally I’m, I’m concerned about climate change, but it wasn’t something you were actively thinking about until I just brought it up.
Mickes: Right.
Sisk: Whereas active concerns are something that you are actively consciously thinking about at a given moment.
You’re wondering whether, uh, the jackhammers can be overheard. You’re wondering whether the recording sounds all right. That kind of a thing. And that’s an active concern that you’re currently thinking about.
Mickes: You’re right. [laughs]
Sisk: Yeah. Those are different. And that’s something that hasn’t been looked into too much when people are looking at the effects of emotion on attention is making that distinction because there’s, uh, intuitively it makes sense that latent concerns, we might be able to kind of push those off, hold those off, not let that influence performance on whatever task we’re completing, but active concerns that come up in the form of task-unrelated thoughts because they’re task-unrelated thoughts, you’re being distracted by those concerns. So we wanted to look at the difference between active and latent concerns and the relationship between them as well.
Mickes: Yeah.
Sisk: So we wanted to then see, do either active, latent concerns, influence any of the components of attention?
Mickes: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Sisk: If they do, which components of attention are more sensitive to the influence of either active or latent concerns. And so those were our main questions and we found that, as we had predicted, as we preregistered, we found that latent concerns did not influence performance on any of the attention tasks. What that means is that there were people in the survey who said, I’m not at all concerned about COVID. I really don’t care about this. It’s not something I’m worried about. And there were some people who said, I’m extremely concerned about this. This is something I’m very worried about. It’s one of my primary concerns. Those two groups performed the same on the attention tasks. So people who were extremely concerned about COVID performed just as well as people who weren’t at all concerned about COVID. And that was true for the kind of state anxiety measures as well, that weren’t COVID specific.
So the kind of latent concerns measured with the questionnaire didn’t seem to influence performance on any of the attention tasks. However, active concerns in the form of task-unrelated thoughts did seem to influence performance on some of the attention tasks.
Mickes: Ooh, so which one?
Sisk: Yeah. So active concerns negatively correlated with performance on the cognitive control task switching task and on the sustained attention scene CPT. The visual working memory task, COVID-specific concerns negatively correlated with performance on the capacity, visual working memory task. But visual search did not negatively correlate with task-unrelated thoughts,
Visual search mm-hmm <affirmative>, it didn’t matter. Active concerns didn’t impact it?
Active concerns didn’t impact it. And.
Mickes: oh,
Sisk: visual working memory was not consistently influenced by active concerns either. The only significant measure was the COVID-specific task unrelated thought, but the task-unrelated thought reported immediately after the visual working memory task did not correlate with performance on that task.
Sisk: So we saw these differences between the tasks and we had hypothesized before the study that, that we would find differences between the tasks in terms of the influence of active concerns on performance, on the tasks. And the reason for that is that you have some tasks that are more kind of external or more perceptual. So with the visual search task, you’re not having to remember rules. You’re not having to attend to internal principles. You are focusing on these external stimuli. And when you’re focusing on the external stimuli, it’s easier, anecdotally, it’s easier to only focus on those stimuli.
There’s something for you to direct your attention to in the external world. And so it’s easier for you to only focus on that and not be attending to the things that you’re holding in your head. Whereas with the switching task, the kind of cognitive control measure, there’s a lot of memory going on, a lot of reflection on, okay, how do these stimuli relate to the things that I’m thinking about? There’s more of an internal or central attention component to that. And so those tasks we hypothesized would be more sensitive to task and related thoughts. And whether that’s because you don’t have the external stimuli to kind of grab your attention, right?
Some researchers believe that task-related thoughts are kind of a, there’s kind of a preparation component to it that when you’re thinking about something other than the task, you’re actually kind of using resources to prepare for future scenarios or, you know, you’re kind of dealing with other problems. It’s just not related to the task that you’re supposed to be dealing with. And so whether it’s because you don’t have those external stimuli to kind of grab your attention or whether it’s because it uses the same resources as these kind of cognitive control tasks, we hypothesized that those cognitive control tasks would be more sensitive to the effects of active concerns or task-unrelated thoughts than the more kind of external perceptual tasks.
Mickes: Right. And that’s exactly what you found.
Sisk: And that is what we found. There were some inconsistencies in where we had hypothesized the four tasks lay on the spectrum from the external to internal spectrum.
Mickes: What do you think that means?
Sisk: This was a question that we had, uh, and to ask ourselves was why, where we predicted. So specifically, for instance, visual working memory and scene CPT, they kind of were flipped. So visual working memory was less sensitive than sustained attention or the scene CPT performance to these task-unrelated thoughts. So visual working memory was less sensitive than scene CPT to task-unrelated thoughts. And we had thought that the opposite would be true that visual working memory, because it’s typically considered an internal component, right. You’re attending to the internal stimuli. We had thought that that would be more sensitive than the sustained attention task, the scene CPT, where you have these external stimuli popping up one after another, and you have to respond to those stimuli. Right. So there’s something in the external world that you’re attending to.
Mickes: Do you have any thoughts about why that is or does it make you rethink what’s being measured with those …
Sisk: Yeah, absolutely. So looking at those findings, we were slightly surprised because they didn’t fall where we had thought. Um, but actually with the scene CPT, specifically, more data that was collected and analyzed concurrently with this study on another study using the scene CPT, um, found that the scene CPT performance on the scene CPT is less about attention to the stimuli and more about withholding response, right? So inhibition of response to those rare mountain images. And so in that sense, it’s actually in a lot of ways more closely related to that task switching task, because performance isn’t based on how well are you paying attention to these images that are popping up on the screen, performance is based on how good are you at remembering to withhold your response when you have to withhold your response. Right?
And so in that sense, we realize that it’s probably more related to cognitive control than these external perceptual tasks than we had previously hypothesized and visual working memory with this specific task that we used, it’s just measuring when you’re looking at the test array with the five colors, and you have to say which one changed, you’re attending to those. And you’re comparing that external stimulus to your internal representation of the encoding array. And so there is an external component to that and our visual working memory task people weren’t required to manipulate the information in any way. We’re not asking them to calculate anything or rotate anything in their memory. Right. And so for that reason, we can understand at least why it might be more on the external perceptual side than we had previously hypothesized. But of course these are instances where it’s slightly different than what we had preregistered and hypothesized. And so I don’t wanna go too far in saying, oh, you know, we can just explain away the results with these post hoc explanations.
Mickes: Right…
Sisk: But it did actually make sense to us those specific tasks, why, why they were switched around. Um, and we had reasons specific- more so with the sustained attention task, the scene CPT task, um, it just made a lot of sense why that would be the way it was.
Mickes: It does.
Sisk: Yeah. And that was one of the reasons that we wanted to look at these four components of attention. In addition to just seeing which real-world tasks might be more affected by increased concerns about COVID, we also wanted to use this as a way to understand better how different components of attention relate to each other. And so this was informative in that way and kind of seeing which tasks correlate with one another, which tasks, uh, showed the same kind of reaction to task-unrelated thoughts and which ones are different in the way that the performance changes as task unrelated thoughts increase.
Mickes: What did you find in terms of the tasks being related to each other?
For the most part, the tasks were not correlated with one another, which is what we had predicted and kind of what we had hoped. You know, we wanted to measure four different components of attention to really get a broad purview of how concerns affect attention. We wanted to get tasks that are measuring different components of attention. And so we wanted them to not be heavily correlated with one another, because if they are, then we’re just measuring the same thing four times. Um, and, and that’s not what we wanted. So for the most part, they did not correlate with one another.
Two tasks correlated with one another two task performance measures. So task switching accuracy in the mixed blocks. So that kind of cognitive control component positively correlated with visual working memory accuracy. That was what we had predicted was that there would be a correlation there. Visual search and scene CPT didn’t correlate with any of the other performance measures. So that was what we found. So we found just a positive correlation between task switching accuracy and visual working memory accuracy.
Mickes: When you were comparing active and latent concerns, what did you find?
Sisk: Active and latent concerns positively correlated with one another, meaning that somewhat unsurprisingly we had predicted this, the more concerned you are about COVID, the more you report thinking about COVID during these tasks, and the more generally concerned you are in that state anxiety measure that we had in the survey, the more likely you are to have task-unrelated thoughts that are general, not necessarily COVID specific. So more heightened concerns, latent concerns, lead to more active concerns. Well, they’re at least correlated with higher levels of active concerns, which is something that we had hypothesized. We think about the relationship between the two, as you have these latent concerns that you’re concerned about, and you have active concerns that you’re actively thinking about. And sometimes you are going to have these latent concerns kind of spontaneously activate and become active concerns. And the more latent concerns you have, the more kind of heightened your level of latent concerns are the more likely you are to have those spontaneously activate and become active concerns.
Right. Um, and so you are … the more of these latent concerns you have, the more likely they are to spontaneously activate. And so we had predicted that the two would be correlated. But it’s actually interesting when you think about the fact that those two are correlated, but latent concerns didn’t correlate with performance on any of the tasks, whereas active concerns did and what could be the reason for that?
And we think of it as even though having more latent concerns does increase the likelihood that you’re going to have these active concerns. You know, some of those latent concerns will spontaneously activate. Overall, we’re actually pretty good at holding off those bad thoughts, right? Holding off those, those latent concerns and not letting them become task-unrelated thoughts during kind of an acute short task that you’re completing.
So while you’re answering an email, something like that, you’re probably pretty good at during that period of time, not thinking about your concerns about COVID, even if you are generally concerned about COVID. Right and so we are good at suppressing those latent concerns and not allowing them to become active concerns. But when they do become active concerns, they might influence performance on more internal attention tasks that involve a high level of cognitive control and attention to remembered rules and principles and that kind of a thing. So you might not be worse at finding your keys, but you’re going to have a hard time, you know, implementing the edits that someone asks you to put into a manuscript. Maybe you’ll have a harder time playing chess, but you wouldn’t have a harder time playing Tetris or something like that. Right.
Mickes: Right.
Sisk: There does seem to be a difference depending on the specific kind of task that you’re doing and, and how likely that is to be influenced by those task-unrelated thoughts, those active concerns.
Mickes: That’s all really interesting. Do you think, and thank you for linking everyday activities to your research.
Sisk: Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the motivations for this was we were saying, you know, we’d like to know, are we, are we gonna be worse at these things that we’re doing every day. As researchers, we’re interested in our own lives. We were kind of thinking the whole time, you know, we wanted to measure these components of attention and it would be interesting in the future to have the same thing, but with more real-world tasks. But we wanted to measure the more kind of controlled components of attention so that we could then make more informed predictions about which real-world task would be influenced by, by these concerns.
Mickes: Are you following up on this research?
Sisk: I won’t be following up on these studies, but it’s possible others will.
Mickes: It’s been such a pleasure to meet you and hear all about this research. Also, thanks for talking about, uh, your thoughts on pre-registration. I think that’s good for, uh, people to talk about. I, I know they are…
Sisk: yea!
Mickes: …talking about it, but it’s, it’s still nice to hear, especially what an early career researcher thinks.
Sisk: Right? Yeah. Cause I do feel like it’s been, it’s been kind of developing and becoming more common as I’ve been becoming a researcher. Right. As I, as I’ve been going through graduate school. And so it’s been an interesting time to go through graduate school and see each year more people are preregistering research.
Mickes: right.
Sisk: And so it’s, and so it’s been a good experience to, to pick that up with everyone else.
Mickes: Thank you so much. I’m gonna read your other paper and uh, your other CRPI paper and uh, keep an eye on the other stuff that might come out of the lab.
Sisk: Yeah. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun talking about the research and talking about preregistration. It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
Concluding statement
Myers: Thank you for listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast.
Featured Psychonomic Society article
Sisk, C.A., Toh, Y.N., Jun, J. & Lee, V. (2022). Impact of active and latent concerns about COVID-19 on attention. Cognitive Research: Principles & Implications 7, 48, https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-022-00401-w