Qualitative Data

After completing the decision paradigm, participants filled out a post-task questionnaire (see Appendix D). These responses provide a qualitative insight into the decision-making processes and individuals’ experience during the experiment.

852.889 1039.095 1058.484 859.123 1006.616 1062.393 800 850 900 950 1000 1050 1100

Congruent Incongruent None

Low High

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They provided an overall narrative, to compliment the findings from the neurocognitive analysis.

When asked about how confident they felt about solving the task (Q.1), participants stated that they felt somewhat confident (Avg. 6 on a scale of 1-10), but that this confidence decreased over time (“the task seemed easy at the beginning, but turned out to be quite hard.”). Related to this, when asked about the strategy used to solve the task (Q.2), individuals stated that this as well changed over time (“I tried remembering what the correct solution was in a particular scenario, which didn't work. I tried a sequential method, this time is blue next time red etc which didn't work.”).

In terms of their main concern (Q.3), participants stated that they did not feel any particular preference between the scenario conditions, as they were mainly focused on making the right choice (“I felt concerned all the time, Not only during the more emotional scenarios.” and “I tried to get every answer right, and got frustrated in the end when I got them wrong.”). While reflecting on their decisiveness and if they reconsidered their choice at the very last moment (Q.4), participants stated that they spent longer on the no-advice conditions, re-assessing and deliberating their choice (“...sometimes I did the last second decisions, as I wasn't completely sure which option to choose...” and “Sometimes, because I was using the time to think it through from the last response.”).

In relation to the limited time available and the need to be accurate (Q.5), participants stated that the short time window added psychological pressure to the task, but that their main focus was still to try and be accurate in their decisions (“I was more concerned with accuracy for the clips that were designed to be emotive.” and “At the start of each experiment I was a little nervous so I was definitely concerned about both time and accuracy but as the experiment progressed I felt more pressured into getting the questions right.”). Finally, when asked if they would have benefitted from more time in order to solve the task (Q.6), participants stated that once they settled into the task, time was not an issue, while they still struggled with being accurate in their decisions (“Once I was settled time was not an issue...”

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and “I didn’t think I could work out any rules to work out which wires to cut, so more time wouldn't have made any difference.”).

When asked about the perceived solvability of the task (Q.7), participants stated that there was no solution, supported by their assessment after trying out various strategies and successful ones being incorrect at later iterations of the task (“I didn't think it was solvable, as I tried a few different techniques to work it out, but didn't get any further.”). Further confirming this position, none of the participants claimed having found the correct solution (Q.8), while further describing the failure of applied strategies as time progressed (“At first I thought something like red wire for a bomb and blue wire for the bell, but in the end I didn't think there was a solution and it was 50/50.”). Despite these responses, participants stated that they still felt pressured throughout the task (Q.9), based on the regular feedback and the overall instructions of the experiment.

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4. DISCUSSION

When considering the results from the experiment along the individual decision-making stages, it was clear that the different types of information provided as advice and the scenarios in which these were presented, had a varying effect on individuals’ cognitive activity and their behavioural response when completing the task. Looking at the different types of advice, it was clear that the information- processing was different in terms of activation, which was further carried over into the implementation stage, significantly affecting the behavioural responses. These were identified at sources related to movement components, while differences were also observed at sources active during executive functioning. Further differences were also observed during all stages for vision-related sources, in terms of strength and length activation, which did not always fulfil expectations, raising some important issues about the experiments’ design. Nonetheless, some key observations were drawn from these, informing propositions about the different consequence scenarios and the varying types of advice.

In order to further expand on these findings, the focus is first on the basic visual and cognitive processing at the initial stage, where individuals received contextual information about the operational scenario. The second part describes the advice presented in order to inform the task, looking at the response to each of the three conditions. Finally, we describe the processes leading to the implementation of a choice, and how these were mapped based on the information available, and discuss the extent to which it was possible to link the EEG results to our behavioural and qualitative measures.