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The paradigm of risk preference suggests different motivations to engage in risk-taking behavior. When individuals are free to choose between different difficulty levels for the same task, failure-oriented individuals who anticipate the negative emotions that accompany failure can be distinguished from success-oriented participants who seek the achievement of success and focus on the feelings such as pride or happiness. In this experiment, participants can choose freely between 4 difficulties for a simple memory task. It is expected that the choice of either very easy or very difficult tasks reflects an orientation towards failure while success-oriented participants go for medium difficulty levels.

The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) measures risk taking behavior. The participant in this task can earn points by pumping up a balloon with the click of a button. The balloon inflates with each click while points are added to a counter. Each time the balloon is inflated, it has a chance to burst. This chance increases for each consecutive pump. Therefore, each pump a greater potential reward, but also a greater risk. However, participants can also cash-out the balloon anytime during the experiment, before it actually explodes. This collects and saves all the points accumulated in this trial, while the bursting of the balloon causes the points to be lost. The balloon's breakpoints are unknown to the participant; thus, this task tests for the participants' initial response to the task as well as the changes of behavior due to gathered experience during the experiment.

In this experiment, two light bulbs and two switches are presented to the participant. Each time one of the switches is activated by clicking on it, one of the light bulb responds by lighting up. However, the causal relation between the switches and the lights are unknown. By testing both switches multiple times, the participant is supposed to generate an idea about his/her ability to influence the light.

In the Iowa Gambling Task, participants are tested for their ability to distinguish beneficial gambles from disadvantageous ones. The task presents four facedown card decks. Each turn, the participant is free to choose one card from one of the decks. For every chosen card, the participants gains money; however, on some occasions, they also lose money based on the picked card. Some decks are beneficial in a way that they offer more gains than losses. By testing each decks multiple times, participants are supposed to identify the beneficial decks and avoid the disadvantageous decks in order to maximize the amount they can gain during the experiment.

The Wason 2-4-6 task illustrates how individuals tend to create and test hypotheses in order to unveil the rules behind an observed phenomenon. In this task, participants see an ordered triplet consisting of the numbers “2”, “4” and “6”. They are instructed to find the correct rule behind the triplet by entering as many number triplets as they wish. For each entered triplet, feedback is provided that tells whether the entered three numbers follows the same rule as the three numbers in question. Research suggests that participants tend to only test positive examples of their hypotheses instead of correctly applying the logical principle of falsification.

In complex environments that require fast and accurate responses (e.g. traffic), individuals tend to neglect information and reduce the amount of stimulus properties they process to a sufficient minimum. Most situations, however, offer more than one of these ‘strategies’ that help to facilitate (but not guarantee) fast and accurate responses. For example, the ordinary traffic light offers both different colors (red, yellow, green) and different positions (top, middle, bottom) as simple, correlating properties that cue the correct response (stop, accelerate/slow down, go). Using a variant of the common traffic light, this experiment examines how consistently participants choose between strategies and whether shifts happen within and/or between subjects.

A dual-task paradigm is a procedure that requires an individual to perform two simple instructed tasks simultaneously. In this particular experiment, one task requires to indicate whether the number ‘1’ or ‘2’ is shown while the other requires to indicate one of four possible positions of the letter ‘X’ on the screen.The participants first engage in both tasks separately, then both tasks are presented either at the same time or with a short delay between. Participants are expected to be slower when two rival task representations have to be accessed at the same time, while longer time spans between the tasks might reduce the effort to solve both effectively.

The experiment presents sequences of two letter-based Flanker-tasks in short succession. Within the sequence of both tasks, the distractor stimulus and the target stimulus may or may not change (but targets never become distractors and vice-versa!). Distractor-response-binding suggests that distractors are integrated with target responses into one stimulus-response (SR) episode. The SR episode is retrieved when the distractor is repeated and as a consequence distractors can retrieve previous responses even though the target stimulus changed.

The Eriksen Flanker Task is a set of response inhibition tests used to assess the ability to suppress responses that are inappropriate in a particular context. The correct response is indicated by a target stimulus in the center. The target is surrounded by distractor stimuli that suggest either the same or a contradicting response. This setup uses arrows to indicate which arrow key should be pressed. Reaction times tend to be faster and the reactions more accurate when the stimuli are congruent (e.g. →→→→→) instead of incongruent (e.g. →→←→→).

In this adaption of the Simon-Task, participants are told to respond to one of two colors by pressing one of two keys on the keyboard. The keys are positioned on different sides of the keyboard. At the same time, the colored stimulus’ location on the screen varies between one of five positions on a horizontal line. Participants are expected to respond faster and more accurately the closer the stimulus’ relative location on the screen is to the relative location of the response, even though the stimulus’ position is irrelevant for the task.

The Stroop effect shows how an automatic, well trained process (e.g. reading) interferes with more effortful and deliberate processing of a stimulus. In this experiment, participants are instructed to react to color names (e.g. the words “red” or “blue”) that are printed in colors other than black (e.g. red or blue) by calling out the color of the print instead of the actual printed word. Whenever the name of a color is printed in a color that is not denoted by its name (e.g. the word “red” written in blue color), participants are expected to be slower and less accurate at naming the color the word is written in.

In this experiment, participants have to switch back and forth between two simple instructed tasks. In this setup, the two tasks involve a) identifying whether a number is smaller or larger than 5 and b) identifying whether a number is even or odd. Research strongly suggests that switching from one instructed task to another and therefore replacing one mental representation of a task with another requires mental effort that manifests in form of slower reaction times right after the switch.

This perceptual task measures differences in attention within or between subjects. The task involves searching for a target stimulus in a visual environment filled with distracting objects or features. In this particular scenario, participants have to identify whether the letter T (target) is hidden among a varying amount of L’s (distractors) by quickly scanning a visual environment that may or may not contain the target stimulus. Findings naturally can be applied to security checks at airports or diagnoses based on imaging procedures in medicine (e. g. radiology).