Nevertheless, bipolar sound ratings and the sentiment of participants' descriptions of how they felt about the sound were highly correlated. Taken together, these findings suggest a role for the features of built environments in impacting how we rate and appraise everyday sounds.

We found that participants rated the same sounds as less pleasant when they were presented in a smaller room with no natural lighting (Old site). However, they didn't use more negatively valenced language when describing the sounds they heard at the Old vs. the New site.

To answer this question, we gave participants a series of everyday sounds (dogs barking, phone ringing, etc.) in either a small lab room with no natural light (Old; A) or a larger space with natural lighting (New; B). We asked them to rate and describe the sound's pleasantness or unpleasantness.

Great talk by @ar0mcintosh.bsky.social at #UBC on the amazing work being done with the Virtual Brain to model and understand how brain activity - and corresponding network - shift with aging. A very powerful tool!

Fitting our results with a drift diffusion model, we found that participants who chose more high effort trials were more biased than low effort preference participants towards rapidly selecting high effort trials (higher drift rate and starting point). (9)

Interestingly, participants who chose more high effort trials (high effort motivation group) took longer to select low effort trials - potentially indicating that they were spending longer discounting reward when the effort cost was too high. (8)

We found that only short term working memory ability predicted whether participants chose substantially more high effort vs. low effort trials. Depression, chronic stress, and reward anticipation levels did not predict effort choices. (7)

...In the choice task, they would choose an easier or harder cognitive effort task (having to encode fewer or more shapes) on each trial. Harder trials gave more points towards a monetary reward; easier trials gave fewer points. (6)

Following a reward anticipation task, participants looked at sets of shapes on screen and judged whether a new shape differed in colour from the original shape in that position. Their short term memory performance in this task determined the next task's difficulty... (5)