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OOPS! Now, why did I do that?

Our Research

Some of our work on attention lapses has recently been published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. You can read them here and here.

We have collected and developed some simple assessment tools and tests to measure the important aspects of inattention and attention lapses. These tools enable us to measure inattention more precisely, and evaluate the impact of personal and situational factors on attention. If you would like to help our research by completing our questionnaires, simply select them from the links below.

Our research studies the nature of everyday attention and memory failures and how they impact our daily lives. All our research is being conducted under the supervision of Dr. Dan Smilek, Department of Psychology of the University of Waterloo, Canada.

We appreciate your interest in our research and ask that you consider participating in it. If you decide to volunteer, you can fill out as many of our attention lapse reports or other questionnaires as you wish. Most of our questionnaires require only a few minutes to complete, and your responses to our attention lapse reports can be as sparse or detailed as you wish. For most questionnaires you will be asked to answer general background questions (for example, your age) but you can choose not to answer these questions if you wish, and you can withdraw your participation at any time by simply not submitting your responses or leaving the Oops! website entirely. There are no known or anticipated risks from participating in our research.

It is important for you to know that our commitment to research ethics ensures any information you provide will be confidential. All of the data will be summarized and no individual could be identified from these summarized results. Furthermore, the web site is programmed to collect responses on the questionnaires alone; we do not collect any information that could potentially identify you (such as machine identifiers). For additional information on how we keep your data safe, please see our Confidentiality Statement.

Our research has been reviewed and received ethics clearance through the Office of Research Ethics at the University of Waterloo. Should you have any questions about our research, or would like to receive a copy of the results of our research please contact us. If you have any concerns resulting from your participation in our research, please feel free to contact Dr. Susan Sykes, Director, Office of Research Ethics, at 1-519-888-4567 x 36005, ssykes@uwaterloo.ca. For more information on how we keep your identity safe, please review our confidentiality statement.

Our Questionnaires

Report an attention lapse in more specific settings:

Attention Lapse Report — ALR

Demographic Information (1 min) — Demographics

Attention Failures (2 mins) — MAAS-LO

Attention-related Errors (2 mins) — ARCES-R

Memory Failures (2 mins) — MFS-R

Self-Efficacy (1 min) — GPSE

Everyday Ennui (5 mins) — BPS

Everyday Emotion (4 mins) — DASS

We have also adapted a common behavioural measure for use on the web. This program requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser. If you see only a blank page when loading the program, enable JavaScript in your browser options and reload the page. This task also requires a keyboard.

Sustained Attention (8 mins) — SART

If you would like to be contacted when we update our questionnaires, or for the opportunity to participate in related research, enter your e-mail address on our mailing list.
As with all research conducted at the University of Waterloo, we take care to ensure your confidentiality and the safety of your data. To view our confidentiality statement, click here.