Cognitive Practical Flashcards
What is the aim of your cognitive practical?
To investigate how slave systems in the WMM affect word recall
What is the abstract of your cognitive practical?
Aim: Will using the same/different slave systems affect the amount of words recalled?
Procedure: read 15 words for 1 minute, given a 2 minute distractor task (word search or spot the difference), had 2 minutes to recall as many words from the initial list as they could, calculated the mean for each group and calculated a Mann Whitney U
Result:
What is the alternative hypothesis (one-tailed) of
your cognitive practical?
Those completing the verbal task (word search) will recall more words out of 15 than those completing the visual task (spot the difference)
What is the sample of your cognitive practical?
Opportunity sampling of 20 participants from a psychology class in college, aged 16-18
What is the procedure of your cognitive practical?
Read 15 words to the participants for 1 minute
Given a 2 minute distractor task of a word search (find words) or a pair of spot the differences (visual)
2 minutes to recall as many words from the initial list as they could
Calculated the mean for each group and a Mann Whitney U
What are the results of your cognitive practical?
Mann Whitney of 27
What is a strength of collecting quantitative data in your cognitive practical?
We can conduct statistical analysis to see whether the amount of words recalled is
really affected by the interference task or if it is due to chance making the findings more valid
What is a weakness of your cognitive practical sample?
Small and is from a local college so their results about visual and verbal memory will not be representative
Why is it good that independent measures were used in your cognitive practical?
Eliminates order effects so their initial experience won’t influence the amount of words that they recall in the second condition raising validity
Why is it a weakness that independent measures were used in your cognitive practical?
Individual differences (like natural memory ability) will impact on the
results (e.g. one student might have a better memory than another and so would recall more words regardless of the distractor task) affecting the validity of the findings about visual and
verbal memory
How is the cognitive practical procedure standardised?
Everyone got the same list of words, timings and tasks to do so the procedure can be repeated to see if results about impact of
visual and verbal tasks are reliable
Why is your cognitive practical low in ecological validity/mundane realism?
Tasks of being given ‘random’ words to recall and then doing an interference task is not how memory works in the real world and so the results from this experiment aren’t valid and applicable to a real world situation of memory
