Arrow Of God Research Paper

[Verline]

Pathdiagrams are visual tools used in social research to map relationships between variables. Variables are the things researchers are interested in studying. In a path diagram, we use arrows to show relationships between these variables.

Suppose a social worker wants to understand the relationship between mental health and homelessness. They might make a path diagram with these two variables. They would use a double-headed arrow to represent the relationship.

This kind of diagram helps the social worker see the complexity of the situation. It can guide them to look for more factors that might be involved, and to think about how they might intervene to help.

All in all, double-headed arrows in path diagrams are a way to show a relationship between two variables without implying a direct cause and effect. They help researchers visualize complex relationships. This can guide further research and action in fields like criminal justice, social work, and political science.

In Experiment 1, to get a mixture of participants who may or may not have heard of the FedEx arrow, we recruited participants from North America using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were not aware of the purpose of the experiment, and were only asked about their prior knowledge of the FedEx arrow at the very end of the experiment.

All participants gave informed consent via mouse click prior to their participation, and all received financial compensation for their time. All experimental procedures were reviewed and approved by the Joint Institutional Review Board of Taipei Medical University, Taiwan.

Participants performed an endogenous attentional cueing task. Instead of an explicit arrow, we replaced the central cue arrow with a FedEx-like figure. A total of 72 FedEx-like figures were created, 12 of which were used in the practice session, and the remaining 60 were used in the formal experiment (Fig. 1).

Procedure of the cueing task. Participants were to press the button according to the location of the target (i.e., exclamation mark), which can be congruent or incongruent with the cued direction. To ensure that participants were paying full attention to the cue, they were asked to perform a delay match-to-sample change detection task at the end of the trial

The experiment consisted of a total of 160 trials, of which 80 were directional (40 congruent, 40 incongruent) and 80 were neutral. In the congruent condition, the direction of the hidden arrow would match the location of the target, and vice versa for the incongruent condition. Because the number of congruent and incongruent trials are the same (i.e., 40 and 40), the centrally-displayed arrow in this study is non-predictive of the actual target location, which has been shown by previous studies to still be able to induce shifts of endogenous attention, especially in the congruent condition, when the arrow is visible (Doricchi et al., 2010; Hommel et al., 2001). All trial orders were randomized across all participants. Participants on average took 20 min to complete the entire task.

In this lab-based replication, university students were recruited to come into the laboratory, and performed the task in a highly controlled experimental setting. Importantly, because FedEx does not handle local parcels in Taiwan, most of the participants have not heard of the FedEx brand before, and none knew about its logo design. Therefore, in this experiment, half of the participants were told about the FedEx logo design as a fun trivial fact prior to the experiment, and were told to keep it in mind throughout the experiment, though no explicit connection to the experiment was given.

All participants gave written informed consent prior to their participation. All received financial compensation for their time. All experimental procedures were reviewed and approved by the Joint Institutional Review Board of Taipei Medical University, Taiwan.

All stimuli were the same as Experiment 1. Participants sat in a dimly-lit room, and rested their chins on a chinrest 57 cm away from the display. The width and length of the FedEx-like images subtended 8 by 8 degrees of visual angle. The task was written and executed using software E-prime 2.0 (Psychology Software Tools Inc., Pittsburgh, USA). All other procedures were identical to Experiment 1.

Due to the manipulation of prior knowledge, the post-experiment survey was slightly modified from Experiment 1. Participants had to answer three questions: (1) Did you notice anything weird about the images from this experiment? (2) During this experiment, did you notice any white arrow hidden inside the images? (3) Can you point out the location of white hidden arrow in the image on the screen? (this was accompanied by a randomly-selected arrow-present image from the experiment).

To substantiate this conclusion, we have to make sure that the congruence effect would indeed emerge when it is picked up by the visual system in our task design. To confirm this, in Experiment 3 we colored the FedEx arrow blue so that it becomes somewhat obvious by not blending into the foreground or background.

Partial stimuli from Experiment 3. All left, right, neutral stimuli (not shown), as well as their reverse controls, were the same as in Experiment 1 and 2, except that the arrows, when present, were highlighted in blue to contrast with the orange alphanumeric characters

Same FedEx-like figures from Experiment 1 and 2 were used here. But, whenever the arrows were present, they appeared in blue to create a clear contrast with the orange alphanumeric stimuli (Fig. 5). All procedures were identical as Experiment 1 and 2.

Same FedEx-like figures from previous experiments were used here. The trial started with a 500 ms fixation cross, followed by a 2300 ms FedEx-like figure. The target exclamation mark would appear either at the left or right side, at 300 ms after onset of the FedEx-like figure. Participants had up to 2000 ms to respond, and the trial would end and go into 1000 ms ITI as soon as a response is recorded (Fig. 7).

Experiment 4b Procedure. Participants were to press the button according to the location of the target (i.e., exclamation mark), which can be congruent or incongruent with the cued direction. The arrows were highlighted in blue to contrast with the orange alphanumeric items

Many studies have already proven arrows to be powerful endogenous cues when used explicitly. For example, Hommel and colleagues (2001) used non-predictive cues that were displayed at the center, and found faster RT when arrow direction and target location were congruent. This RT facilitation effect was still present even when participants are explicitly told by the experimenter that the arrows are non-predictive (Tipples, 2002). What sets the current study apart, then, is that the arrow is also presented centrally, but as part of the background. Previous studies have already suggested that figure-ground segregation can be achieved implicitly and automatically (Kimchi & Peterson, 2008). Furthermore, implicitly processed arrows (via masking) can be processed to an extent that can induce priming and inverse priming effects (Verleger et al., 2004). However, most studies have focused on the perceptual fate of the figure, where unconsciously processed (e.g., backward masking, continuous flash suppression) or unattended (e.g., inattentional and change blindness) figures are able to prime certain behavioral responses. Yet, in the case of the FedEx logo, the arrow is actually part of the background, whose shape happens to carry symbolic directional information. Therefore, in this study we are essentially asking whether people process, or extract meaning from, a background that they are not aware of. It is important to note that the FedEx logo is ideal in this scenario because the arrow literally is the background space, and it contains no features except a blank space that is the same color as the general background (as opposed to other experimental paradigms where background is loosely defined as objects presented in the periphery or away from the center of focused attention).

The authors thank 2 anonymous reviewers for their valuable inputs that have inspired Experiment 3 and 4, and improved the quality of this manuscript. The authors also thank Shashi Ranjan for his help with Experiment 4.

PT conceived the research idea, SCK designed and drew the FedEx-like images. SCK, AG, YHL, CCT, and PT all contributed to the experiment design, data collection, data analysis, and manuscript write-up.

All participants gave informed consent prior to their participation via mouse click in the online experiment and via signed consent form in the laboratory experiment. All experimental procedures were reviewed and approved by the Joint Institutional Review Board of Taipei Medical University, Taiwan.

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