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, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
At Oops! 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 attention on a variety of personal and situational factors. If you would like to help our research by completing our questionnaires, simply visit our Be a Participant page.
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 only information needed to store your responses on the questionnaires or tasks you choose to complete; we do not keep 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.
