2.5 - practical investigation

Question 1

what was the aim of the practical?

Answer 1

to investigate the effect of attention on recall of material from the STM

Question 2

what is the IV?

Answer 2

whether the word material is attended to or not (operationally defined as whether music played to pps has lyrics or not)

Question 3

what is the DV?

Answer 3

the recall of the word material (operationally defined as how many words from a list of 10 the pps can recall)

Question 4

what is the target population?

Answer 4

16-18 year old females in the West Midlands

Question 5

what is the sample?

Answer 5

8 16/17 year old females from the West Midlands

Question 6

what is the sampling method?

Answer 6

opportunity sampling

Question 7

what is the experimental design?

Answer 7

repeated measures

Question 8

what was the procedure?

Answer 8

1. approach pps and use recruitment script to ask if they will participate
2. instruct pps on what will happen with experiment -they will put headphones on and play a piece of music (either instrumental or with lyrics), before we will read out a list of 10 words (two syllable commonly used nouns), when we have finished reading we will tap the table, they will pause the music and then write down as many of the words as they can remember, we will then repeat with the other piece of music
3. debrief the pps using our debrief script

Question 9

what were the results?

Answer 9

lyric condition:
* mean - 5.250
* median - 5
* mode - 5
* range - 6
* SD - 1.83

instrumental condition:
* mean - 5.625
* median - 5.5
* mode - N/A
* range - 5
* SD - 1.69

Question 10

strengths - generalisability?

Answer 10

• conducted in classroom which is realistic setting for where people try to memorise stuff
• although people don’t normally recall random words, they often try to memorise stuff while listening the music when studying making task generalisable

Question 11

strength - replicability/reliability?

Answer 11

• standardised procedure used with controls eg. reading words at rate of 1 per second so others could replicate to show reliability

Question 12

strengths - validity?

Answer 12

• controlled for extraneous variables
  order effects - used counterbalancing (pps split into two groups and completed conditions in different order)
  noise - pps wore headphones to prevent noise other than music providing distraction

Question 13

strengths - ethics?

Answer 13

• obtained informed consent from pps
• kept results anonymous to maintain confidentiality
• gave pps full debrief telling them aim of experiment
• made clear to pps that they had right to withdraw at any time

Question 14

weaknesses - generalisability?

Answer 14

• sample only contained 16/17 year olds even though target population included 18 year olds - couldn’t generalise findings to find out effect of attention on recall from STM in 18 year olds