Social Dual Task Developmental Dataset and Analyses

Project abstract: Many situations involve processing social and non-social information simultaneously. However, is not known how performance is affected in such situations. Here, we examined how our ability to process social information is affected by the need to keep track of non-social information. Both adolescent and adult participants were instructed to carry out two tasks within each trial. The social task involved referential communication – requiring participants to use social cues to guide their decisions. At the same time, cognitive load was manipulated by requiring participants to remember non-social information in the form of either one or three two-digit numbers visually presented before each social task stimulus. Data: These files include our dataset, as well as the scripts used to analyze the data. You will need to download R (http://www.r-project.org/) to use these files. Data are from 35 adolescents (11-17 years, mean age=14.5±1.7) and 29 adults (22-30 years, mean age=25.1±2.3). Ages are not provided to preserve anonymity. Participants completed an adapted version of the “Director Task” (Dumontheil, Hillebrandt, Apperly, & Blakemore, 2012) with an embedded working memory (WM) Task component. Afterwards, participants completed a verbal reverse digit-span task as a measure of WM capacity and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index questionnaire to assess individual differences in trait perspective taking (Davis, 1980). We have also included information about the errors made by individuals, as well as the Director Task stimuli. Data Analysis: We used the lme4 package in R (Bates, Maechler, & Bolker, 2013) to perform a linear mixed effects analysis on the relationship between our factors of interest and accuracy and RT for both tasks. As we hypothesised main effects and interactions between many of our variables, we determined which factors best predicted performance for our measures of interest by creating global models including cognitive load, condition, perspective, WM Capacity, TPT, as well as a combined metric of TPT and WM capacity (Combined Traits), as fixed effects. Random intercepts for each participant were included in all models. We compared all possible combinations of the variables within our global model using an automated model selection procedure (MuMIn1.10.0; Barton, 2013). Models were ranked using Second-order Akaike Information Criterion (AICc; Burnham & Anderson, 2002). We first tested for group effects by including all participants and including group (adolescents or adults) as a fixed effect. If there was a group difference on a performance measure we then checked to see if the best fitting model differed between groups. The object_positions.xls file shows the object positions (slot number) for each of the 48 Director Task stimuli. For example, in a trial using picture number 1, the participant would need to select the object in slot number 3 during 3-object trials in which the Director shared the same perspective as the participant. However, the participant would need to select the object in slot number 11 during 3-object trials in which the Director had a different perspective than the participant (i.e., the Director is behind the shelf array). Finally, on 1-object trials, the participant would need to select the object in show number 6. You can use this file to do error analyses with the provided dataset to see what kind of errors participants made in the Director Task.