The effect of verbal priming of visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children

Researcher: Solveig Jurkat, M.A., University of Münster

Our first user success story comes from the beautiful city of Muenster (Germany). Prof. Dr. Joscha Kaertner and his research group are interested in developmental aspects in Psychology. Solveig Jurkat is one of Prof. Kaertners graduate students, and she implemented a really interesting with Labvanced study that allowed them to publish their study in the Journal of Cognition. Here is her story:

Short Interview with Solveig:

What is your field of study? My research focuses on the development of culture-specific attention styles and the proximal mechanism underlying this development. Investigating the role of verbal attention guidance, I used Labvanced to examine the attention patterns of 4-9 year old children after priming them with verbal cues accentuating either analytic (i.e. object-focused) or holistic (i.e. context-focused) processing.

What did you like most about using the Labvanced platform?
The intuitive design made me appreciate Labvanced – the overall design starting from the factor trees, events, and block sequence was easy to follow and Caspar and Holger were of great help during the process. I especially appreciated that the platform allowed me to realize my research without the need of Matlab or other programming expertise, since I had no programming experience before using the platform.

Are you planning to continually use the Labvanced platform? Yes! I am currently working on a new project which is an extension of the recently published study using the Labvanced platform. Since the Covid-19 pandemic prevented us from inviting participants to the lab, I am curious to implement the eye-tracking tool in Labvanced, which was not yet available 3 years ago when I first used the platform. I am grateful for all the experience that Labvanced mediated for my academic endeavors.