When there is a threat hypervigilance and an evaluation strategy that results in increased false positives are rational responses. This does not mean that hypervigilance or higher rates of false positives are the cause of the threat.
But there is also in eg marketing/business literature discussion of saliency and involvement. None of which are any insinuation on the 'emotional processes' of the individual, just state that the item in question as presented is more relevant to some than others. I doubt this goes near hypervigilance levels anyway. PLus they haven't proven that their measure: time to reply isn't just them taking advantage of the disabled group being slower in general and them basically having contrived to say 'if the disabled group are slower it means all that nonsense', which would be like using dyslexics vs those without dyslexia to make the same claim. Or have I missed the round where pwMS suddenly sped up when it was 'custard and custard' ?
I think we have to realise that reading through a pointless list of words is both pointless and boring and people stop bothering to take them in. Which is why there is an industry called copywriting and marketing, so that at least if a lot of blaah is written someone has made some attempt at understanding the target audience and what they are expecting to see written about on that page/ad and so on.
I'm slightly sure
@rvallee could add a bit about how A/B testing is properly used by an industry that actually doesn't contrive results because er you know they actually want to use the real answer/get to the truth. I don't understand why people are allowed to pretend they can't read another literature when the topic-matter is identical and provides the exact info they need to make their method not nonsense.
And of course as you've recruited people under some pretext the
only thing of interest by that point might be the puzzle of guessing what is really being tested. Unless for example you are a professional control who does these things a lot more than eg someone who has severe MS and it takes a lot out of them.
Plus
If they started listing words that all had to do with building and some of those who were reading them happened to work in the surveying industry or were in the middle of moving house (looking for, buying, having a survey) or having their own repairs done then they might bat more of an eyelid over the word 'plaster' or 'joist' than those who either have never thought about buying or have been settled in their own for many years and couldn't care less/find this stuff disinteresting.
Same thing if you had people who had an element of legal in their role and some of the words had such meanings/implications, but mean nothing more than custard does to others.
They've basically just deliberately picked a bunch of boring words that have little meaning or point to anyone, then if any word gets any sort of 'increase' are making outrageously unsubstantiated claims. WHen the obvious, explained in the literature and so should have been controlled for in their design, explanation is you've got a load of people waiting for something that makes their trip in for the 'experiment' not pointless. They are 'waiting for it to start'. Just like sitting through the ads at the cinema in the old days and some indicator that the film is nearly going to begin - like the bit where they advertise the company of the film - might get everyone in the movie theatre starting to prick up their ears. Sadly it sounds like for this one the 'film' never came. And as for the controls I suspect the lower difference is because they are less 'involved' with whether the whole thing is pointless because that isn't their motivation so they are 'dulled' to it all.
In this way the word 'tired' doesn't have to 'mean' anything along the lines of the authors' nonsense, just that if you got a load of people with a severe form of one illness in for an experiment and presented them with a list of nonsense they might be intrigued to finally see
anything that might have
any relevance to the BS they got given to drag them in there.
And controls of course wouldn't be 'up' with the list of symptoms because why would you.