Hi all,
I'm designing a hypothetical psychology experiment for a PhD grant, and I could use some input from you guys.
So, the general research question has to do with how we process verbal information versus numerical information when making decisions or evaluating a situation. There has been quite a lot of research on this topic when it comes to how we assess nutrition values when buying groceries and how we evaluate risks of side-effects in medicine (for instance depending on if the label says "very rare" or "0.001%").
My idea is to look into how verbal vs. numerical information affects you cognitively when evaluating a chess position. But how would be a reasonable way of doing this?
One way would be to conduct an experiment where the participants are assigned to solving a set of chess puzzles. One group gets verbal clues that helps them with each puzzle; one group gets numerical clues; and the control group doesn't get any clues at all.
The question is - what would be a clever way of making verbal and numerical clues? The verbal and numerical clues need to be fairly equivalent, i.e conveying the same information, for instance "a move with the rook is 80% likely to be the winning move" versus "a move with the rook is very likely to be the winning move". This would, however, be a bad clue since if there is a single winning move it will always be 100% likely to be the winning move. Even with the clues the puzzle should still require some thinking, and they should still be difficult enough for the participants to fail now and then.
A long and complicated question perhaps, but do you have any thoughts? All suggestions are welcome!
I'm designing a hypothetical psychology experiment for a PhD grant, and I could use some input from you guys.
So, the general research question has to do with how we process verbal information versus numerical information when making decisions or evaluating a situation. There has been quite a lot of research on this topic when it comes to how we assess nutrition values when buying groceries and how we evaluate risks of side-effects in medicine (for instance depending on if the label says "very rare" or "0.001%").
My idea is to look into how verbal vs. numerical information affects you cognitively when evaluating a chess position. But how would be a reasonable way of doing this?
One way would be to conduct an experiment where the participants are assigned to solving a set of chess puzzles. One group gets verbal clues that helps them with each puzzle; one group gets numerical clues; and the control group doesn't get any clues at all.
The question is - what would be a clever way of making verbal and numerical clues? The verbal and numerical clues need to be fairly equivalent, i.e conveying the same information, for instance "a move with the rook is 80% likely to be the winning move" versus "a move with the rook is very likely to be the winning move". This would, however, be a bad clue since if there is a single winning move it will always be 100% likely to be the winning move. Even with the clues the puzzle should still require some thinking, and they should still be difficult enough for the participants to fail now and then.
A long and complicated question perhaps, but do you have any thoughts? All suggestions are welcome!