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Figure 1 | BMC Psychology

Figure 1

From: The relationship between trait empathy and memory formation for social vs. non-social information

Figure 1

Example of a lottery choice slide presented during memory encoding. Each circle represents a lottery, which could have a financial gain (positive numbers on green part of a circle) or a financial loss (negative numbers on red part of a circle) as an outcome. A choice had to be made which of the two lotteries would actually be played. In half of the trials, the financial gain or loss of the lottery played was assigned to the participant (non-social encoding condition), in the other half to another person in need (social encoding condition; see text, for details). In an active choice condition, participants selected the lottery to be played themselves, while in a passive choice condition, the computer made the choice randomly. (A slide in the beginning of each trial announced the respective experimental condition of the trial, i.e. whether it was social vs. nonsocial and whether it was active or passive). After the choice had been made, the chosen lottery was marked, and finally the outcome of both lotteries was shown. Memory for all numbers presented in the lottery task was assessed in a subsequent recognition memory test. During performance of the lottery choice task, participants were not aware that a recognition memory test for the numbers would follow.

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