714 trials contain enough movement data for animation and comparison after filtering unusable or empty movement logs.
Spatial organisation, strategy quality & blank-card usage
Research question: Can we predict card-sorting task success by analysing how people work (behaviour patterns) rather than just their final outcome?
Move 0 / 0
This viewer treats every card placement as evidence of strategy. The final outcome matters, but the movement path reveals whether a participant was building an organised spatial plan, repeatedly undoing work, using blank cards as scaffolding, or recovering across repeated attempts.
714 trials contain enough movement data for animation and comparison after filtering unusable or empty movement logs.
Participants arranged Kings, Queens, Jacks, and sometimes blank cards while each row, column, card identity, and outcome was preserved.
The interface compares final organisation, within-trial progression, repeated attempts, speed, and repeated card placements.
Analysis Type changes the behavioural question being asked. Some views focus on clean successes, some on messy failures, and some on progression or repeated attempts.
Participant appears for repeated-attempt analysis only. It lets you compare all trials for one person chronologically instead of mixing everyone together.
Trial selects the exact movement sequence. The dropdown includes participant ID, outcome, condition, move count, messiness, and recovery labels where relevant.
Show Final State jumps to the final board, including blank cards, so you can inspect the completed organisation without playing every move.
| Condition | Cards Available | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| KQ | King + Queen | Simple rank grouping without extra working-memory load. |
| KQB | King + Queen + Blank | Tests whether blank cards help participants scaffold a layout. |
| KQJ | King + Queen + Jack | Adds a third rank, increasing organisation complexity. |
| KQJB | King + Queen + Jack + Blank | Combines higher card complexity with optional blank-card support. |
1. Successful Clean Patterns — successful trials with enough movement to show strategy rather than a trivial placement.
2. Failed Messy Patterns — failed trials where organisation breaks down early or never stabilises.
3. All Successful Trials — a broad comparison of winning paths, including different move counts and conditions.
4. In-Trial Progression — highlights early moves in blue and late moves in orange so improvement or deterioration is visible inside one trial.
5. Opening Strategies — focuses on the first five moves, because early anchors often shape the rest of the layout.
6. Repeated Attempts and Success Recovery — only participants with multiple usable trials are shown, making retry/progression comparisons meaningful.
7. Extreme Cases by Outcome — cleanest and messiest examples are separated by success/failure so extremes do not collapse into only failed trials.
8. Speed Comparison — compares quick successful solvers with slower successful solvers to separate efficiency from exploration.
9. Card Repetition Patterns — surfaces whether participants repeatedly revisit the same card/position or explore broadly.
More moves do not automatically mean better strategy. Successful participants tend to preserve coherent regions, while failed trials often show repeated local changes without a stable global plan.
When blanks are available, they can function as external working-memory placeholders. The advantage is strongest when participants use blanks to reserve structure rather than treating them as random fillers.
Repeated attempts are especially useful because they show whether a participant changes strategy after failure or simply repeats the same unstable pattern.
Messiness score summarises spatial disorder in the final or evolving layout. Lower values indicate tighter grouping and cleaner spatial structure.
Move count is not treated as success by itself. It is useful only when interpreted alongside outcome, messiness, condition, and whether movements are repetitive.
Blank-card comparisons show whether conditions with blank cards improve completion rates, but the interpretation is behavioural support, not proof that blanks alone cause success.
Progression views are descriptive. They reveal within-trial change, but should be read as strategy evidence rather than a clinical-style prediction model.
These plots summarise the behavioural dataset behind the viewer. Read them together: success rate, condition, messiness, move count, and blank-card use each explain a different part of strategy quality.
Counts the usable trials by final outcome. This gives the base rate before interpreting strategy details.
Compares how task materials affect completion. Conditions with blanks should be read as support/scaffolding opportunities.
Contrasts average spatial disorder for successful and failed trials. Lower messiness usually means clearer grouping.
Shows whether successful and failed participants differ in exploration volume. More movement is not automatically better.
Compares success rates when blank cards appear versus when they do not. This is behavioural evidence for scaffolding.
Box plots show spread, mean, and outliers, making it easier to see whether failures are consistently messier.