NBack lists report

Generated 2026-05-04T14:55:18+02:00 · seed: 20260427 · 50 main lists · 3 training lists

Experiment schedule

A participant who fails >50% of a level does not proceed to the next, so the task time depends on the highest N-back level they complete. The rightmost column (5-back) is the upper bound; in practice most participants top out around 4-back. Topping out at X < 5 means the participant attempted N=X+1 and failed it, so each non-max cell includes one extra main list (64.8 s) plus its training if X+1 ≤ 3. The “1-back” column has only the K=1 cell because failing N=2 drops the cap below 2 and ends the experiment immediately, so K>1 with max-N=1 is unreachable (—). The “Instructions” column is fixed (5 min); the per-level columns cover, for each level reached (and the failed attempt where applicable), the corresponding training list (21.6 s; only 1-, 2-, and 3-back have training), the main lists (64.8 s each), and a 60 s break between every consecutive list. Add the “Instructions” column to a per-level cell to get the wall-clock total.

Participant schedules

prerandomize.py also writes 1000 per-participant schedules (schedules/000.csv … schedules/999.csv), one for each possible 3-digit participant code. Each schedule has 50 rows = 10 blocks × 5 N-levels, with the 10 list-letters per N-level used in a permuted order. The experiment loads schedules/{participant}.csv at runtime and skips rows where the cap has dropped below the row's N or where the row's block exceeds the experimenter-set nBlocks.