Adapted a game used in a neuroscience study from Elon University. This study will examine how willingness to expend effort changes in cooperative versus competitive social contexts. In the game, participants are told they have been matched with another anonymous person in the room. In reality, the “partner” is virtual, whose decisions and outcomes are coded into the task. During each trial, participants choose between a hard difficulty level and an easy difficulty level. I n both conditions, participants press a button until they fill a progress bar within a prescribed amount of time. After each trial, participants are entered into a lottery with a 50% chance of adding their winnings to their bank and told their virtual partner’s decision and outcome.
I am responsible for translating the original EEfRT task code into a new version that fits the parameters of this study. This includes adding the cooperative and competitive modes, designing the behavior of the virtual player, adding new effort levels, new variables that will be used in the behavioral models, and the lottery system. I also created behavioral models of effort using the experimental data. I used model-free (linear regression) and model-based (by maximum likelihood estimation of decision utility) analyzes to determine putative cognitive models for competitive versus cooperative socially motivated effort expenditure.