Cognitive - Andrade 2009 Flashcards
What is the background of the study?
- Ppt daydream when doing smth boring > not paying attention
- Not known if doodling aids in concentration
What is the psychology being investigated here?
- Attention: mental ability to concentrate
Paying attention to one message
Divide our attention focus on more than one message
Selective attention focus on one message while ignoring another message - Memory: refers to our ability to store information that has been processed then locate and retrieve it later
What is the aim of the study?
- Test whether doodling aided concentration in a boring task
Describe the ppts in the study?
- 40 ppts
- From Applied Psychology Unit ppt panel at Uni of Plymouth in UK
- volunteered for different study but recruited via oppurtunity sampling > once original study done researcher approached them and asked if they would spend another 5 mins taking part in study
- 18 - 55 yrs old
- paid for participating
- randomly assigned to either control grp (20 ppl - 18 females + 2 males)
- doodling group (20 ppl - 17 females + 3 males)
Describe the recording played to the ppts
- Researcher recorded mock telephone message using casette recorder
- Monotone voice used
- Average speaking rate was 227 words per minute
- Played at comfortable volume
- 8 names of ppl would attend party
- 3 names of ppl would not + 1 cat not attending
- 8 location were mentioned
Explain why the study is investigating doodling?
- Prior to study not known whether doodling impairs attention processes by taking away resources from primary task / aids concentration towards primary task
- Common in research on attention to set ppts dual tasks to monitor preformance > aim to find out which cognitive processes are needed to complete these tasks
What was the design of the study?
- Labratory experiment
- Independent measures design (experimental + control grp)
- Recruiting from another unrelated experiment was done to enhance boredom of the task
What is the independent variable?
Doodling / not doodling
What was the dependent variable?
Memory recall
Ppts had to remember the names + places
what was the monitored information?
names of party goers
what was the accidental information?
names of places
How was the DV operationalised and how was the final score calculated?
- To operationalise the DV plausible mishearing such as Greg for Craig allowed
- names on tape not partygoers were false alarms
- FINAL memory score for monitored info (names) and incidental info (places) was no. of correct names / places minus false alarms
Describe the procedure of the study?
- ppts led to quiet + dull room
- tested individually
- write down names of ppl coming to party
- ignore names of those not coming
- do not write anything else
- doodling sheet has 10 shapes per row each row alternated between squares and circles
- LHS margin was 4.5cm so that ppt write down any target info when doodling
- doodling was to relive boredom of task
- control grp given piece of lined paper w pencil
- listened to tape which was 2.5 minutes
11.order of tests counterbalanced > names then places / places than names
12.debriefed and apology
13.asked if suspected memory test to check for demand charecterisitics
How long was the tape
2.5 min
Describe the doodling paper?
10 shapes per row
Each row alternated between squares and circles
LHS of margin 4.5cm so ppt could write down any target info
Told did not matter how neat / quick they shaded
CONTROl > piece of lined paper w pencil
