Grant Et Al Flashcards
What does the study focus on?
Context-dependant memory.
What is context-dependant memory?
Refers to improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same.
Theories of the study?
Context-dependent memory can enhance the recall of information.
Effects of context change on memory retrieval are much greater in recall tests than in recognition tests.
Background to the study ?
Research shows context-dependence plays an important role in numerous events e.g. memory for studied material.
Grant et al were interested in school tests.
Their focus is on study conditions, not test environments, as they have more control where they can study.
What is the aim of the study?
Grant et al wanted to show that environmental context can have more positive effect on the performance in a meaningful memory test when the test takes place in the same environment in which the to-be-remembered material was originally studied (matching condition) than when the test occurs in a different environments (mismatching conditions).
What was the research method?
Include method and design.
Lab experience.
Independent measures design.
What was the IV and the DV?
IV 1: Whether the participants read the two page article under silent or noisy conditions.
IV 2: Whether the participants were tested under matching or mismatching conditions.
(Four conditions)
DV: was the participants performance on: a) short answer recall test and b) a multiple-choice recall test.
What was the sample?
Eight members of a psychology class were the experimenters. Each experimenters recruited five acquaintances to serve as participants. There were 39 participants ranging in age 17 to 56 (one participants results were omitted from the data as they were a major outlier).
The stimuli of the study.
RAP.
Each experimenter provided their own cassette player and headphones, they were all exact copies of background noise.
An article on psychoimmunology was selected as a the to-be-studied material.
16 multiple choice questions (recognition) and 10 short answer questions (recall) were asked about the text.
The short answer test was always done 1st to ensure that recall of information was being tested and not recall of information from the multiple-choice test.
The procedure of the study.
Describe the experiment as a class project which was voluntary.
Given the text for a class assignment.
Informed that they would be tested on both the short answer test and a multiple-choice test.
All participants wore headphones while they read, those in the silent condition were told they would not hear anything over the headphones (no cassette), whilst those in the noisy condition were told they would hear moderately loud background noise but they should ignore it.
Reading times were recorded.
Two minute break before the tests began to minimise recall from short-term memory.
Participants were tested in either silent or noisy conditions and were informed of the conditions before testing, all participants still wore headphones.
After they were told about the purpose of the experiment, it took about 30 minutes.
Key findings.
Studying and testing in matching conditions meant participants did better than mismatching conditions.
The participants in all groups spent roughly equal amounts of time studying the material, this maximises the internal validity as reading time is not a CV.
Conclusions of the study.
Studying and testing in the same environment produces better results.
There was no overall affect of noise on performance , however students are encouraged to study in silent conditions, not noisy, as the tests are most likely to be in silent.
Strengths of the study.
High internal validity - RAP (limits EVs) , everyone wore headphones.
Quantitative data - easily summarised and compared between conditions.
Ethics - voluntary
Reliability - scientific (lab) , easily replicated to see if it’s true to everyone.
Limitations of the study.
Low ecological validity - May only be true for psychology students , which is only a small minority , so can’t generalise findings to real world.
EVS - two tests , fatigue effect.
