# Documentation Welcome to the additional protocol documentation for **"Of Primary Importance? Motivation Drives Resource Allocation Across Concurrent Tasks During Multimedia Processing."** This manuscript contained four experiments. - [Experiment 1][6] - [Experiment 2][7] - [Experiment 3][8] - [Experiment 4][9] The stimulus used in each of these experiments was *Asteroid Impact*. *Asteroid Impact* is a point-and-click style video game developed in `Python` where subjects use a cursor to collect crystal-shaped targets that are displayed at different locations on the screen while avoiding asteroids that bounce around the screen. Game difficulty is manipulated by altering the number of targets a subject needs to collect, the number of objects to be avoided, and the rate at which these objects move. The stimulus provides tremendous experimental control in that all random aspects of the game are removed; any differences in game experience are the result of player intervention. To help resolve this potential confound, the stimulus provides a high resolution content analysis of all events in the game (e.g., when a crystal is collected, x/y position of the player's cursor, time when player "dies") with 16ms temporal resolution. This content analysis is exported to a `.csv` file that allows for subsequent computation using a wide variety of analysis packages. ![Asteroid Impact Gameplay][1] In each experiment, some rounds of gameplay contained an additional manipulation designed to induce either cognitive load or perceptual load. ## Cognitive Load In the **Cognitive Load** manipulation, participants were told that "some of the crystals are dangerous" and that if they collected two crystals in a row of the same color, they would lose 1000 points (the equivalent of ten crystals). This manipulation was based on a 1-back memory maintenance task (see e.g., Eriksson, Vogel, Lansner, Bergström, & Nyberg, 2015; Veltman, Rombouts, & Dolan, 2003), which has been shown to elicit broad activation in cognitive control-related brain regions and to be perceived cognitively difficult. ![Cognitive Load Instruction Screen][2] ![Cognitive Load Gameplay][3] ## Perceptual Load In the **Perceptual Load** manipulation, in-game objects were obscured through the use of a semi-transparent overlay. Perceptual load was not a topic of interest in this manuscript. ![Perceptual Load Instruction Screen][4] ![Perceptual Load Gameplay][5] ## STRT Task During gameplay, participants also completed a secondary task. In this secondary task, participants were asked to press a key upon seeing a shape appear on screen. Participants were told that they should focus their attention on collecting crystals, but that they should respond as quickly as they can when they see the shape. In each experiment, a subset of the reaction prompts were rewarded with a much higher point value than were other reaction prompts (1000 points vs. 10 points). In experiments 1 and 4, there were two different shapes (a triangle and a square) each requiring a different button press (z and x). One of these shapes was a high-reward prompt and the other was a low-reward prompt. In experiments 2 and 3, there was only one shape (a star) and participants were asked to press the spacebar. In these experiments, reward was manipulated between rounds. In some rounds the probe was worth 1000 points and in some rounds it was worth 10 points. [1]: https://mfr.osf.io/export?url=https://osf.io/d6g24/?action=download&mode=render&direct&public_file=False&initialWidth=848&childId=mfrIframe&parentTitle=OSF%20%7C%20gameplay.png&parentUrl=https://osf.io/d6g24/&format=400x400.jpeg [2]: https://mfr.osf.io/export?url=https://osf.io/jk2rq/?action=download&mode=render&direct&public_file=False&initialWidth=848&childId=mfrIframe&parentTitle=OSF%20%7C%20cogload_instr.png&parentUrl=https://osf.io/jk2rq/&format=400x400.jpeg [3]: https://mfr.osf.io/export?url=https://osf.io/4gke7/?action=download%26mode=render%26direct%26public_file=False&initialWidth=848&childId=mfrIframe&parentTitle=OSF+%7C+cogload.png&parentUrl=https://osf.io/4gke7/&format=400x400.jpeg [4]: https://mfr.osf.io/export?url=https://osf.io/nvf49/?action=download&mode=render&direct&public_file=False&initialWidth=848&childId=mfrIframe&parentTitle=OSF%20%7C%20percload_instr.png&parentUrl=https://osf.io/nvf49/&format=400x400.jpeg [5]: https://mfr.osf.io/export?url=https://osf.io/dae7q/?action=download&mode=render&direct&public_file=False&initialWidth=848&childId=mfrIframe&parentTitle=OSF%20%7C%20percload.png&parentUrl=https://osf.io/dae7q/&format=400x400.jpeg [6]: https://osf.io/xdsv2/wiki/Experiment%201/ [7]: https://osf.io/xdsv2/wiki/Experiment%202/ [8]: https://osf.io/xdsv2/wiki/Experiment%203/ [9]: https://osf.io/xdsv2/wiki/Experiment%204/