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The idea here is to provide our participants with a "warm-up" or "training" task, which we can exclude from our later analysis. (Participants may use this first task to click around the tree and explore a bit, even if they know the correct answer, so it's best to omit this the results may be dodgy and therefore omitted from our later scoring.)
What makes a good first "training" task?
- The task is not too hard.
We don't want participants to be intimidated or dismayed at how hard our warm-up task is. - The most likely paths go at least 2 clicks down the tree.
We want participants to see that the tree is multi-leveled, and is only shown one branch at a time. - The results for this task are not important to our study.
Because this is a "throw-away" task, we want to pick something that we don't really care about (because we'll be ignoring this task's results later).
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Next: Letting participants skip tasks
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