Response bias in deaf and hearing subjects as a function of motivational factors.

This experiment assessed the effect of different payoff matrices on 6 deaf and 6 hearing subjects on a visual brightness discrimination task. Subjects were required to make forced-choice responses to three different monetary payoff conditions, designed to induce a liberal, a conservative, and an equal-bias response criterion, respectively. The results showed that the deaf did not select the superior response strategies they had exhibited in a previous study (Bross, 1979) on the effect of changes in stimulus probability. Furthermore, the deaf earned significantly less money than the controls for all three conditions, indicating that the introduction of motivational demands affects their response strategies adversely.