Cognitive Area

Question 1

Cognitive Approach

Answer 1

• cognitive processes, computer analogy, mechanistic
• Assumes that behavior is a result of mental process e.g. memory
• These mental processes are similar to a computer process; information is input through sensory systems such as the eyes, processed through thinking and output as physical behaviour
• Behaviour is soft deterministic as decision making is a cognitive process, a person has limited choice within the cognitive information they had before the behaviour

Question 2

Cognitive Strengths

Answer 2

• Useful: research has practical applications in the real world e.g. developing interviewing techniques for police officers without leading words
• Scientific: credible methods used to investigate mental processes so a cause and effect can be established

Question 3

Cognitive Weaknesses

Answer 3

• Lack ecological validity: laboratory experiments don’t represent real life settings/environment
• Lack validity: cognitive processes can only be studied by inference and not studied directly e.g. by self-report, observation or interpreting recordings of the active part of the brain

Question 4

Grant Context

Answer 4

• Memory is affected by the context in which memory is encoded and retrieved
• Characteristics of the environment are encoded as part of the memory trace and can be used to enhance retrieval of other information in the trace

Question 5

Grant Aim

Answer 5

• Are context cues important when remembering newly learned information
• Whether memory is better in matching or non-matching conditions

Question 6

Grant Research Method

Answer 6

• Laboratory experiment with an independent measure design
• Whether participants read the two page article in noisy or silent conditions
• Whether the participant is tested under matching or non-matching conditions

Question 7

Grant Sample

Answer 7

• 40 students from Iowa State University
• Aged 17-56 (17 females and 23 males)
• In an opportunity sample by student experimenters recruiting five people each

Question 8

Grant Procedure

Answer 8

• Students were tested individually and randomly allocated to one of the four conditions
• Learn in silence and recall in silence (match), learn in silence and recall in noise (non-matching), learn in noise and recall in noise (match), learn in noise and recall in silence (non-matching)
• All participants wore headphones, those in the noisy condition heard a recording of café noise which was a mix of conversation and the movements of chairs and dishes at a loud volume, in the silent condition participants heard nothing
• Participants read a 2-page article on psychoimmunology and were told that they would be tested on the material, they could highlight and underline this
• The time taken to read the article was recorded in minutes for each participant and there was a 2-minute break between reading the article and the start of the test
• The first test was a 10 short-answer questions and the next one was a 16 multiple-choice questions, it was done in this order so that recall was accurately tested and not influenced by information from multiple-choice

Question 9

Grant Results

Answer 9

• They all spent roughly the same time reading the material
• Short-answer question results (silent-silent=6.7,
  silent-noisy=4.6)
• Information was better remembered in matching conditions than in non-matching conditions

Question 10

Grant Conclusion

Answer 10

• Context cues are important in the retrieval of newly learned information
• An academic application is that students may perform better in exams by studying in silence

Question 11

Grant Evaluation

Answer 11

• Method: controlled laboratory experiment meets scientific criteria, however the use of the independent designs meant there may be individual differences between groups
• Data: quantitative data collected which is easy to summarise and compare between groups
• Ethics: informed consent, voluntary participation, briefed about the task and debriefed on the study’s true purpose at the end
• Validity: high design validity due to having a standardised procedure however is not ecologically valid as this is not how revision and testing are usually spaced in lessons
• Reliability: meets scientific criteria so can be replicated and findings can be correlated to look for test-retest reliability
• Sample: opportunity sample as each student experimenter recruited five people but may be a biased which limits generalisability
• Ethnocentrism: cognitive processes depend on the physiognomy of brains but the study was conducted in America so may differ for people without western knowledge/education

Question 12

Loftus & Palmer Context

Answer 12

• Memory is affected by schema (pockets of information that an individual already knows)

Question 13

Loftus & Palmer Aim

Answer 13

• To investigate the effect of leading questions on eyewitness memory
• They hypothesised that the strength of the verb used in the leading question will have a significant effect on participant’s reports of the speed of the crash

Question 14

Loftus & Palmer Research Method

Answer 14

• Two laboratory experiments each with an independent design

Question 15

Loftus & Palmer Sample

Answer 15

• Experiment 1: 45 Washington University students randomly allocated into five groups of nine
• Experiment 2: 150 students randomly allocated to three groups of fifty

Question 16

Loftus & Palmer Procedure 1

Answer 16

• Participants watched 7 videos of car accidents and were asked to write an account of what they’d seen
• They had a questionnaire which had the critical leading question asking “how fast were the cars going when they ‘hit/ smashed/ collided/ contacted/ bumped’ each other
• They were divided into five groups and each had a different verb

Question 17

Loftus & Palmer Procedure 2

Answer 17

• Shown a film of a car accident and were given a questionnaire
• Group 1 was asked the leading question with the word ‘hit’, group 2 were asked with ‘smashed’, group 3 (the control group) wasn’t asked a leading question
• A week later they returned and were asked more questions including the critical question “did you see any broken glass?” although there was none

Question 18

Loftus & Palmer Results

Answer 18

• Experiment 1: mean speed estimated for smashed was 40.5mph and for contacted was 31.8mph meaning the leading question affected their perception of speed
• Experiment 2: 16 people from the smashed condition said they had seen glass while only 7 from the hit condition said they had seen glass meaning that those who thought the car was travelling faster were more likely to have a false memory of seeing broken glass

Question 19

Loftus & Palmer Conclusion

Answer 19

• The meaning of the verb used in the leading question becomes integrated with the memory of the even
• This means that the memory becomes changed and a false memory is constructed
• What happens after witnessing an event can alter our memory of the event.

Question 20

Loftus & Palmer Evaluation

Answer 20

• Method: was a controlled laboratory experiment with scientific criteria of theory, control, evidence, replication
• Data: data from both experiments was quantitative so can be easily summarised and comparisons can be made
• Ethics: although the hypothesis was hidden participants were still aware of this being a test of memory and the clips shown were from safety films so did not cause harm or upset
• Validity: high design validity but lacks ecological validity due to controlled laboratory conditions
• Reliability: can be replicated due to them being highly controlled laboratory experiments meeting scientific criteria
• Sample: students of a narrow age group were used as well as them having upper family income so their results aren’t generalisable to the wider population
• Ethnocentrism: it could be that cognitive processes are species specific but at the same time only university educated people were used

Question 21

Moray Context

Answer 21

• During a dichotic listening task Cherry found that more information was recalled from the ear receiving the ‘shadowed’ message rather than the ‘rejected/blocked’ message

Question 22

Moray Aim

Answer 22

• To find out whether participants can remember the content of the message in the ‘non-attended’ ear in a dichotic listening task when shadowing a message from one ear

Question 23

Moray Research Method & Sample

Answer 23

• 3 laboratory experiments

- On male and female undergraduate students

Question 24

Moray Procedure 1

Answer 24

• A short list of words were repeated 35 times as the ‘rejected/blocked’ message while they shadowed a prose message presented to the other ear
• After 30 seconds the participant was asked to recall words in the non-attended message in a recognition test of 21 words
• Participants still could not recall words from the non-attended message despite it being repeated many times

Question 25

Moray Procedure 2 [name]

Answer 25

• Participants were asked to shadow ten short passages of fiction and were given instructions at the start of the passage such as ‘listen to your right ear’, ‘listen to your right ear – you will receive instructions to change ears’
• In six of the passages instructions were given within the passage such as ‘change to your other ear’ and half of the instructions had the participants name in front
• When the instruction was in the non-attended message participants heard 20 of the 39 times when the instruction was preceded by their name but only heard 4 of the 36 times when the instruction was not preceded by their name

Question 26

Moray Procedure 3 [numbers]

Answer 26

• Two groups of 14 participants shadowed one of two simultaneous dichotic messages
• Some of the messages had digits towards the end of the message and sometimes this was in one or both of the messages
• One group was told they would be asked question about the content of the message while the other was asked to remember as many numbers as they could, there was no significant difference in the number of digits recalled in either condition

Question 27

Moray Conclusion

Answer 27

• When paying attention to a message from one ear the rejected message from other ear cannot penetrate the attention block
• However, important messages such as a persons name within the rejected message can
• It is difficult to make neutral material e.g. numbers important enough to

Question 28

Moray Evaluation

Answer 28

• Method: high controlled lab experiments with standardised procedures for internal validity, but ppts may have shown demand characteristics and lacks ecological validity as environment is not representative of real life
• Data: quantitative such as number of unattended messages recalled so can be easily compared between conditions and presented
• Ethics: tasks were clearly explained before the study and participants weren’t distressed
• Reliability: uses highly controlled laboratory experiments meeting criteria of scientific research so can be replicated to establish test-retest reliability
• Sample: sample were easy to gather but may have higher levels of cognitive ability compared to general population so limits generalisability
• Ethnocentrism: findings reflect how English speaking westerners’ attention process works

Question 29

Simons & Chabris Context

Answer 29

• The study builds on classic studies of divided visual attention to examine in-attentional blindness for complex objects and events in dynamic scenes

Question 30

Simons & Chabris Aim

Answer 30

• To find out the degree to which details of our visual world are perceived
• Whether unusual events are more likely to be detected

Question 31

Simons & Chabris Research Method

Answer 31

• A laboratory experiment using an independent measures design

Question 32

Simons & Chabris Sample

Answer 32

• A volunteer sample of 228 observers who did so without reward, or received sweets or were paid a single fee

Question 33

Simons & Chabris Procedure

Answer 33

• There were 4 videos tapes created and each tape featured two teams of three basketball players, one team wore white shirts the other wore black and they moved around passing a ball to each other in an open area in front of an elevator
• Four conditions: transparent/umbrella, transparent/gorilla, opaque/umbrella and opaque/gorilla
• Halfway through a 5s unexpected event occurred either a tall women holding an open umbrella walked through or a person in a gorilla costume
• The video type was either transparent (using superimposed separate recording of the white team, black team and unexpected event) or opaque (all actors were filmed simultaneously)
• There were 4 task conditions: white/easy, white/hard, black/easy and black/hard
• All observers were separately tested and gave informed consent and told to pay attention to one team and either kept mental count of the total number of passes by the attended team (easy) or separate mental count of the bounce passes and aerial passes (hard)
• The observers were asked a series of questions including: “Did you see a gorilla/ a woman carrying an umbrella walk across the screen”

Question 34

Simons & Chabris Results

Answer 34

• Out of 192 observers 46% failed to notice the unexpected event
• Data from 36 observers was discarded for various reasons

Question 35

Simons & Chabris Conclusion

Answer 35

• If we are paying close attention to one aspect of our environment we may not notice large objects nearby and this is called in-attentional blindness

Question 36

Simons & Chabris Evaluation

Answer 36

• Method: controlled laboratory experiments met scientific criteria giving it high-design validity as extraneous variables were controlled
• Data: quantitative data so is easily summarised and compared between conditions and quantify the overall level of in-attentional blindness in the study
• Ethics: informed consent was obtained and participants were briefed about the task and debriefed
• Validity: findings are concurrently valid with both the computer-based studies and Neisser’s umbrella-woman video making conclusions valid, but lacks ecological validity responding to a filmed task isn’t the same as focusing attention in a real setting
• Reliability: highly controlled laboratory experiment is scientific so can be replicated to establish test-retest reliability
• Sample: volunteer samples are quick and easy but limit generalisability as sample may be certain type of people interested in the research so may be biased to show demand characteristics
• Ethnocentrism: cognitive processes such as in-attentional bias depend on the physiognomy of the brain so the study isn’t ethnocentric as it studies a species-specific behaviour

Question 37

Cognitive Studies

Answer 37

Loftus & Palmer - Eyewitness Testimony

Grant - Context Dependent Memory

Moray - Auditory Attention

Simons & Chabris - Visual Inattention