Figure 1
Our modified BART task required participants to press a button labelled “Air” (or, in the main study, use a keyboard press) to pump up a balloon and earn points. The balloon grew in response to every pump. The task was divided into two blocks, each with 30 trials (30 balloons). Participants were told how far through each block they were (e.g. Balloon 1 of 30). Participants were instructed to pump the balloon as many times as they wished and to collect their points at any time, but were warned that the more they pumped the balloon up, the more likely it was to burst. This burst was associated with a penalty – either the loss of all the points for that balloon (low-cost block), or all the points for that balloon and an additional 200 points (high-cost block, pilot study) or 1000 points (high-cost block, main study). Once they had chosen to collect the points, they were presented with a screen containing the number of points they had earned from that balloon (see ‘Point Collection’ screen), or if the balloon burst, they received the ‘Negative Feedback’ screen that corresponded to the block they were in.
Figure 2
Relationships between measures derived from the BART task and Catastrophizing scores in the pilot study (x axis), displaying the per-participant mean on each variable, and with a regression slope fitted using the ‘lm’ method from ggplot2. A) There was no significant relationship between the transformed number of times each participant pumped the balloon up and their Catastrophizing scores, in either block (LC or HC) of the BART task. B) There was no significant relationship between Catastrophizing scores and risk-taking in a computational model of the BART task. C) There was a significant relationship between Catastrophizing scores and learning rate in a computational model of the BART task, but only in the ‘high-cost’ block.
Figure 3
Relationships between measures derived from the BART and Catastrophizing scores in the main study (x axis), displaying the per-participant mean on each variable, and with a regression slope fitted using the ‘lm’ method from ggplot2. A) A significant negative correlation between the transformed mean number of pumps in the LC block of the BART task and Catastrophizing scores. B) No correlation between the transformed mean number of pumps in the HC block and Catastrophizing scores.
Figure 4
Relationships between computational parameters derived from the BART and Catastrophizing scores in the main study (x axis), displaying the per-participant mean on each variable, and with a regression slope fitted using the ‘lm’ method from ggplot2. A) No significant relationship between the risk-taking parameter and Catastrophizing scores. B) No significant relationship between the prior belief parameter and Catastrophizing scores.