Figure 1
From: Overstatement in happiness reporting with ordinal, bounded scale
Experimental task and functional magnetic resonance imaging scan schedule.
A trial consisted of three parts: (1) a question-receiving period, where the subject is shown the mosaic or the amount of money (0–5.0 s); (2) a response-formulation period, where the subject is shown the description of the method that they should use to answer (5.0–7.5 s); and (3) an answering period, where the subject is saying the answer (7.5–10.0 s). In the TEST task, the reward amount was shown on the screen for 5 s, followed by an interval of 2.5 s for response-formation and reporting. Subjects reported verbally how happy they were with the reward amount on a scale of 1–9 in ordinal trials and with an integer greater than or equal to 0 in cardinal trials. During the reporting interval, a fixation point was displayed on the screen in red. In the CONTROL task, subjects were asked to describe how large a white area was within a black-and-white mosaic (square 20 × 20 grid) shown on the screen for 5 s, followed by the 2.5 s reporting interval. Subjects reported how large the white area in the square was on a scale of 1–9 in ordinal trials and with an integer greater than or equal to 0 in cardinal trials. The sparse sampling method (ON: 2.5 s; OFF: 2.5 s) of Hall et al. (1999) was used. We compared event-related activity during the response-formulation periods (5.0–7.5 s).
