Discussion
We examined approaches to address both attrition and data quality when recruiting participants via crowdsourcing. Although there are many possible measures of data quality (e.g., number of characters on survey responses), performance accuracy on a simple operant task served as the measure of data quality in the present study. Instead of using MTurk, we recruited participants using Prolific, a crowdsourcing platform specifically catering to researchers. Our primary findings were that higher pay corresponded with reduced attrition and greater performance accuracy. Additional instructions did not affect these outcomes.Additional instructions–that is, informing participants about the task, asking for personal information on the consent form, and describing the negative impact of attrition on research quality–did not impact attrition relative to minimal instructions (cf. [Consistent with findings with participants recruited from MTurk [A related finding was that higher actual pay rates were associated with more accurate performance on common tasks used to assess inhibitory control and behavioral flexibility [One limitation of the present study is that demographic variables (e.g., age, sex, income) were not controlled for or assessed when examining performance accuracy. There is some evidence for age- and sex-related differences in performance on tasks assessing inhibitory control. For example, studies have shown that, among healthy participants completing a go/no-go task, older adults make fewer no-go errors compared to younger adults [A second limitation of the present study is that we used a broad definition of attrition. That is, attrition included both failure to (1) complete an ongoing experimental task, and (2) return to the Prolific website to complete a second task (survey). Some researchers might be interested in addressing within-task attrition specifically, given that is rarely tracked or reported [A third limitation is that participation in the present study required installing the Inquisit Player (Altogether, our findings demonstrated that paying participants at a rate well beyond the US minimum wage, and closer to a 