Implementation of the official protocol (protocol document code: 49TQVF) **Experimenters** *One postgraduate (Master’s degree) student (Maria Zwienenberg), a postdoctoral research associate (Dr. Sarah Hardcastle), and two Professorial faculty members (Professor Martin Hagger and Professor Nikos Chatzisarantis, the experiment leads) will conduct the experiment, although the majority of data collection will be completed by the research student, Maria Zwienenberg. All experimenters have previous experience running similar experiments but the student and research fellow will be naïve to the study hypothesis. The student and research associate were given all of the printed materials ahead of time and asked to familiarise themselves with it, and then given a thorough explanation of the protocol by the lead authors. Prior to actual data collection, the experimenters will be further trained on the protocol by shadowing the lead author in a pilot of the study protocol and will be observed administering the protocol in a further set of pilots.* **Piloting / training** *Piloting will be done prior to registration of this plan. The student and research associate have piloted the experiment under the guidance and supervision of the faculty members on pilot ‘participants’ from the lab. If the research associate does end up collecting data, she will do the same pilot, and we will update this page. * **Experimenter knowledge of expected outcomes** *The postgraduate student will be naïve to the experimental hypothesis and the two conditions will be labelled condition A (control) and condition B (depleted) so as to minimise any expected effects caused by the labels “easy” and “hard” for the conditions. The E-Prime files have been re-named to read “CondA” rather than “easy” and “CondB” rather than “hard”. We have also not used words such as “hard”, “easy”, “depletion” etc. in any of the study materials. The postgraduate student has a psychology undergraduate degree and is studying for a psychology Master’s degree so may be aware of the depletion effect. The research associate has undergraduate degrees and PhD in other fields and has experience with psychology experiments but is unlikely to have direct experience or knowledge of the depletion effect.* *We will explicitly ask the experimenters at the end of data-collection to what extent they were aware of the hypotheses, and will add to the Results section then. We will send out the debrief at the end of the experiment when all data has been collected, so we expect this to minimise experimenters’ knowledge of the effect under investigation.* **Recruiting** *Participants will be recruited from the School of Psychology and Speech Pathology undergraduate participant pool at Curtin University, Perth and students will receive 3 course credits for their participation. First, second, and third year undergraduate students are required to collect a total 6, 10, and 10 points, respectively, to progress on their Psychological Science courses. We will recruit from the participant pool using a closed online program (Sona Systems Inc.) where researchers post their experiments with the time, room number, number of credits rewarded, and a brief description of the study. Students can scroll through and select any experiment in which they would like to participate. Participants can cancel up to 12 hours before the study begins, or can opt out of any study and do an alternative assignment. All participants will be informed on the online system that they will we asked to participate in “a study on word and number recognition and reaction time” and that they will receive three points, and that it will last 35 minutes.* **Sample, participants, and randomisation** *We will collect data from participants between March and May and expect to run about 20-30 participants per week and each participant will be run individually. We will stop data collection after 120 participants have been reached exclusions excepted.* *If at any point after half of the participants (N = 60) have completed the study we find that the gender balance is outside of the acceptable range (30:70 male to female ratio), we will restrict recruitment to only the under-represented gender until that is corrected. All participants will be fluent in English as it is the language of instruction of the university and we will include a screening question at the beginning of the study for native-spoken language. The postgraduate student will interact with each participant strictly according to the step-by-step protocol (document code: KCWW2005). Participants will be assigned using a block randomisation procedure in groups of 10 and we will check to see if there is an imbalance of participants in each conditions caused by exclusions, and will alter the block randomisation schedule to recruit a greater number of the condition short on numbers due to exclusions.* **Setting/Lab/Equipment** *The experiments will be run in a purpose-built psychology laboratory (Psychology Experimental Research Laboratories at Curtin; PERL-C) with isolated sound-proofed cubicles containing PCs loaded with Eprime v.2 experimental software. The use of isolated cubicles ensures that participants will be unaware of any other participants and experiments and will experience no distractions during the course of the study tasks. The cubicles are lined a long a short corridor whether the experimenter can wait while the participants engage in study tasks uninterrupted. We have removed the ‘bell ring’ in the step-by-step protocol and instead ask participants to open the cubicle door into the corridor to alert the experimenter that they have finished each segment of the experiment.* *Cubicle PCs run Windows 7 and have a basic mouse, keyboard, and LCD screen. We are currently using version 2.0.10.353 on E-Prime in the labs. We will be gathering questionnaire and demographic data on paper.* *DEBRIEF: All of our participants will be given a delayed debrief one all data collection is complete.*