So the same different task involves flashing letters, a pause, then another set of letters and the participant has to decide if the two sets are the same. kind of paradoxically what ends up happening is that same trials are actually responded to faster on average than different trials. which is a bit odd, because in theory you only need to notice one different letter to answer "different", whereas for "same" trials you have to look at every letter. there are a few theories for this but none of them have really been proving. what my experiment is looking at is "psychological entropy" theory to explain this, which essentially suggests that the reason same trials are faster is the lack of options, in the sense that if the second set of letters are the same, there's only one way in which they can be the same, whereas if they're different, they can be different in hundreds of different ways. its something my supervisor has been working on and i thought it was interesting enough so i suggested an idea for experiment design.
