Grant et al

Question 1

What was the aim of Grant’s study?

Answer 1

To test the effect of noise as a source of context on the studying and retrieval of meaningful material in an academic context

Question 2

What is context-dependent memory?

Answer 2

The improved recall of specific information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same

Question 3

How was the sample for Grant’s study recruited?

Answer 3

The sampling method was Snowball Sampling

• 8 members of a psychology laboratory class were EXPERIMENTERS in this study
• these 8 students then recruited 5 acquaintances each to serve as PARTICIPANTS

Question 4

Outline the sample used in Grant’s study

Answer 4

• 39 participants
• Age of participants ranged from 17-56 years
• Mixed gender sample of 17 females and 23 males

Question 5

What was the method used in Grant’s study?

Answer 5

Laboratory experiment

Question 6

What was the design used in Grant’s study?

Answer 6

Independent measures design

-each participant took part in one of the 4 conditions

Question 7

What were the IVs in Grant’s study?

Answer 7

• Whether the participant read a two page article under silent or noisy conditions (study context)
• Whether the participant was tested under matching or mismatching conditions (test context)

Question 8

What was the DV in Grant’s study?

Answer 8

the participants performance on a short answer recall test and a multiple choice test

Question 9

What were the conditions in Grant’s study?

Answer 9

Matching conditions:
study context silent, testing context silent
study context noisy, testing context noisy

Mismatching conditions:
study context silent, testing context noisy
study context noisy, testing context silent

Question 10

Outline procedure of Grant’s study

Answer 10

• Participants were asked to read/revise an article on psycho immunology and were told their comprehension was going to be tested on the subject through both a short-answer test and a multiple-choice test.
• Whilst revising, participants wore headphones whilst reading the article (as a control). Participants allocated to the noisy studying condition were played background noise recorded from a university cafeteria whilst p’s allocated to the silent studying condition weren’t played anything
• Participants were given 2 minute break between the end of the study phase and the beginning of the test phase in order to minimise recall from short-term memory
• The short-answer test was given first and was followed by the multiple-choice test. Participants were tested in either silent or noisy conditions and were informed of the condition before testing began (with the same recording being played to those in the noisy condition). Regardless of testing condition, all participants wore headphones. At the end of testing, participants were debriefed concerning the purpose of the experiment.

Question 11

Outline mean scores /10 scored by participants in the short answer test from Grant’s study

Answer 11

Test Condition Silent Noisy
Silent 6.7 5.4
Noisy 4.6 6.2

Question 12

Outline mean scores /16 scored by participants in the multiple choice questions test from Grant’s study

Answer 12

Test Condition Silent Noisy
Silent 14.3 12.7
Noisy 12.7 14.3

Question 13

Outline a conclusion from Grant’s study into context dependent memory

Answer 13

• Studying and testing in the same environment leads to enhanced performance.
• People should study in the same conditions that they know they are going to be tested in, for example students should study in silence as their exams will also be in silent conditions
• Studying in matched silent conditions produced higher results in the tests that the matched noisy conditions