paper 1 cog ERQ

Question 1

Chou and Edges (2012)

Answer 1

AIM
- To determine whether availability heuristic of social media Facebook posts causes other people to evaluate their social lives disproportionately to those who experience less availability heuristic from less social media usage
Availability heuristic is a bias where more available examples in memory causes people to overestimate the frequency of the example

STUDY
Survey

PARTICIPANTS
- 425 US students

METHOD
- Participants gave details on how long they spent on Facebook a day, and how long they’d used FB, and how many FB friends they didn’t know personally
- Also gave details about the average time spent with real life friends
- Participants completed a survey with a 10 point scale to measure how strongly they agreed with statements such as: “many of my friends are happier than me”

RESULTS
- The participants who spent more time on FB were more likely to agree other people were happier than them
- Those who spent more time seeing their real life friends were less likely to believe their friends were happier than them

IMPLICATIONS
- The more time spent on FB means that examples of people having fun social lives were more plentiful or available and thus more likely to disproportionately compare themselves and assume less happiness of their own lives

Question 2

Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)

Answer 2

AIM
- to investigate how electronic devices and technology effect cognitive processes of memory and learning

STUDY
- true experiment

PARTICIPANTS
- 109 students
In two groups: laptop to take notes OR pen and paper to take notes

METHOD
- The participants were instructed to take notes on 4 lectures with the note taking device they were assigned
Participants were tested the following week on the lectures, and could not revise their notes at home
- Half of the people in the laptop condition, and handwritten condition were then randomly assigned to revising their notes for 10 minutes before being tested
- The test included a mix of factual and conceptual questions on each lecture

RESULTS
- Both participants in handwriting and laptop conditions which did not revise their notes did poorly on factual knowledge and well on conceptual knowledge with no significant difference in performance
- However, when the handwritten participants which revised their notes did significantly better than those who revised their computer notes

IMPLICATIONS
- Digital technology negatively effects memory by reducing the depth of encoding when learning information, as information can be transcribed instead of synthesised and summarised due to the seeming advantages of technology
- Taking notes by hand is slower which forces students to process the information and synthesise, and deeper semantic processing during encoding thus better memory causing better test results
- Whereas, laptop notes which are fast thus conducive to transcription, causes the information to be processed only at a shallow level thus easily forgettable

Question 3

Blacker et al (2014)

Answer 3

AIM
- To investigate the effects of the digital technology of video games on visuospatial working memory

STUDY
- true experiment

PARTICIPANTS
- 34 male students who hadn’t played games within the last year
- Split into 2 conditions: action game // non-action game

METHOD
- Visuospatial working memory was tested, before and after gaming, by a change detection task involving discerning whether cards were the same or different.
- The participants played the game for 1 hour everyday for 30 days

RESULTS
- The action game group showed significant improvement in the change detection task
- The non-action group did not improve in the change detection task

IMPLICATIONS
- Visuospatial working memory improved as a result digital technology of an action game