Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2023 Nov 23;13(1):20574. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-46048-5.
Attention often disengages from primary tasks in favor of secondary tasks (i.e., multitasking) and task-unrelated thoughts (i.e., mind wandering). We assessed whether attentional disengagement, in the context of a cognitive task, can substantially differ between samples from commonly used online participant recruitment platforms, Prolific and Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Initially, eighty participants were recruited through Prolific to perform an attention task in which the risk of losing points for errors was varied (high risk = 80% chance of loss, low risk = 20% chance of loss). Attentional disengagement was measured via task performance along with self-reported mind wandering and multitasking. On Prolific, we observed surprisingly low levels of disengagement. We then conducted the same experiment on MTurk. Strikingly, MTurk participants exhibited more disengagement than Prolific participants. There was also an interaction between risk and platform, with the high-risk group exhibiting less disengagement, in terms of better task performance, than the low-risk group, but only on MTurk. Platform differences in individual traits related to disengagement and relations among study variables were also observed. Platform differences persisted, but were smaller, after increasing MTurk reputation criteria and remuneration in a second experiment. Therefore, recruitment platform and recruitment criteria could impact results related to attentional disengagement.
注意力常常从主要任务转移到次要任务（即多任务处理）和与任务无关的想法（即思维漫游）。我们评估了在认知任务的背景下，来自常用在线参与者招募平台 Prolific 和 Mechanical Turk（MTurk）的样本之间的注意力转移是否会有很大差异。最初，通过 Prolific 招募了 80 名参与者来执行一项注意力任务，其中错误导致扣分的风险是可变的（高风险= 80%的扣分机会，低风险= 20%的扣分机会）。通过任务表现以及自我报告的思维漫游和多任务处理来衡量注意力转移。在 Prolific 上，我们观察到的注意力转移水平出人意料地低。然后我们在 MTurk 上进行了相同的实验。惊人的是，MTurk 参与者的注意力转移比 Prolific 参与者更为明显。风险和平台之间也存在交互作用，高风险组的表现优于低风险组，即任务表现更好，但仅在 MTurk 上。还观察到与注意力转移相关的个体特质以及研究变量之间的关系在不同平台上存在差异。在第二个实验中增加了 MTurk 的声誉标准和报酬后，平台差异仍然存在，但较小。因此，招募平台和招募标准可能会影响与注意力转移相关的结果。
