Paper 1 Psychology the Cognitive Approach (SAQs)

Question 1

Loftus and Palmer

Answer 1

**Aim: To investigate whether the use of leading questions could influence estimations of speed
Participants: 45 students

Procedure:
- During the study, the participants were split into 5 groups of 9
- All participants would watch 7 films of traffic accidents where two cards collided
- After each film, the participants were then asked to give an account on the accident they had just witnessed, and given a questionnaire which asked them a series of questions, including one critical question
- The critical question asked the participants ‘About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other’. In the critical question, the word ‘hit’ was substituted with either ‘smashed’, ‘contacted’, ‘bumped’ or ‘collided’ among the groups
- The verbs were selectively chosen to range in their intensity for this investigation

Results:
- The highest mean estimate of speed was seen in the group which had the critical word ‘smashed’
- Conversely, the group with the critical word ‘contacted’ had the lowest mean estimate of speed
- Using statistical analysis, the researchers then confirmed the differences seen among the groups to be statistically significant

Conclusions: Through the results of this study, it appears that the critical word of the question used would consistently affect the participant’s estimate of speed. The researchers argued two possible reasons for this.

1. The variation of answers between groups was due to response bias, where as the participants are uncertain about the exact speed, a verb like “smashed” biases their response towards a higher estimate.
2. It may also be that the way the question is formed results in a change in the participant’s mental representation of the accident, e.g. the verb “smashed” activates a cognitive schema of a severe accident, that may change the participant’s memory of the accident.

Evaluation:
1. Strengths
- Cause effect relationship
- Statistical conformation
- Confounding variables controlled
- Independent sampling

2. Weaknesses
   - Low ecological validity
   - Small sample size
   - Low generalisability to only students
   - low ecological validity

Question 2

Landry and Bartling

Answer 2

Aim: To investigate if articulatory suppression would influence the memory recall of a written list of **phonologically dissimilar letters **
Participants: 34 undergraduate psychology students

Procedure:
- To test the effects of articulatory suppression on the memory of participants, the study split the participants into an **experimental, group, and a control group **
- For the trials, the control group were presented with a list of 7 phonologically dissimilar letters for 5 seconds, where afterward were told to wait another 5 seconds before they were given an answer sheet with 7 blank spaces where they were asked to fill in those spaces with the letters they were previously shown in the correct sequence.
- The experimental group had the same exact procedure, except, had to perform an articulatory suppression task from the moment of presentation of the letters, to one they filled out the answer sheet
- The articulatory suppression task had the participants count the numbers ‘1,2’ out loud for every second for the entire duration of performing the task
- Each participant in both groups did 10 trials, and had 1 additional trial at the beginning to ensure the participants were acquainted with what was needed

Results:
- It was seen that the participants in the experimental group had performed significantly worse than the participants in the control group during the experiment.
- Though the experimental group and control group had a different average of recall accuracy, surprisingly, the standard deviation between the two groups were nearly identical
- Using a T-test, the researchers further confirmed that the results of the two groups were significantly different, and that it was unlikely this was due to chance.

Conclusion: The poor performance in the experimental group was attributed to the fact that by performing an articulatory suppression task during the memory recall of phonologically dissimilar letters, that the phonological loop of their brain would be overloaded, preventing rehearsal of the letters.

Evaluation:
1. Strengths:
- Cause effect relationship
- High internal validity
- Statistical conformation
- Strong method that is repeatable

2. Weaknesses
   - Low ecological validity
   - Only suggests the evidence of the phonological loop, not the visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer, and central consecutive
   - Low participant number
   - Demand characteristics as participants were psychology students
   - low generalisability

Question 3

Glanzer and Cunnitz

Answer 3

Aim: To see whether the interval of time between words in a list would increase the number of words recalled at the beginning of a list
Participants: 240 army enlisted men ‘

Procedure:
- The 240 participants were randomly assigned to one of six conditions in an independent samples design, with 40 individuals per group.
- Each group would independently listen to a standardised list of 20 common mono-syllabus words, where at the end of the list, were given **2 minutes to write down as many words as they could recall from the list. **
- The differences between the conditions were defined by two variables, the interval of time between words, and the repetition of words.
- This resulted in 6 combinations of conditions: words presented once at a 3-second rate, words presented twice at a 3-second rate, once at 6 seconds, twice at 6 seconds, once at 9 seconds, and twice at 9 seconds.
- Before the experiment had begun, the researchers did a practice trial with all participants using a 5 word list

Results:
- It was found that an increased time in the interval between words led to an increase in the recall of all words, except at those at the end of the list.
- The researchers had also seen that the repetition of words only had an effect in the groups with 3 second intervals.

Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that the primacy effect is as a result of rehearsal. The increased time had led to more time available for the rehearsal of words, which had led to an overall increase in words re-called.

Evaluation:
1. Strengths:
- Large sample size
- Controlled laboratory setting
- Independent sampling reduces demand characteristics and order effects
- Cause and effect relationship

2. Weaknesses
   - Low ecological validity
   - Only applicable to army enlisted men

Question 4

Cox and Griggs

Answer 4

Aim: To investigate whether the use of matching bias would be less commonly used to solve a wason selection task when more personally relevant
Participants: 144 undergraduate psychology students

Procedure:
- The participants were randomly allocated to** 1 of 6 conditions in order to counterbalance the experiment.**
- All participants in each condition were given a notebook with 3 wason selection tasks to solve
- The wason selection task involved participants choosing which 2 cards out of a collection would be needed to be flipped in order to prove a statement correct
- Out of the 3 wason selection tasks, there was an abstract task, an intermediate task, and a personally relevant task. These tasks would range in their applicability/familiarity to real scenarios, with the abstract task being the least familiar, and the personally relevant task being the most familiar
- The differences across the groups were the order of the questions given to them

Results:
- The abstract task was solved the most incorrectly, with the personally relevant task was solved the most correctly
- When participants were given the more abstract task first, it was seen that there was increased likelihood of an increase in cognitive biased used to solve the rest of the tasks

Conclusion: It appears that when the task cued memory of experience, a more rational approach was taken to choosing the cards. The more abstract and less relevant the task, the more likely that cognitive biases would be used to solve the problem. This demonstrates how system 1 thinking was used as with personally relevant real-life scenarios we already understand, System 1 can make a quick and accurate judgement because it’s seen that kind of logic before in the real world. In contrast, as abstract problems don’t link to our everyday experience, system 1 has no pattern to fall back on, so it often makes a poor guess.

Evaluation:
1. Strengths:
- Repeated measured design as all participants solved all 3 wason selection tasks, which reduces the effect variability amongst participants
- 144 participants is a decently large sample size
- They counter-balanced the conditions to control for order effects.

1. Limitations:
   - The studies lack ecological validity as the procedure was highly artificial (There are many factors that are not accounted for, including the importance of the decision or the role of others in making the decision.)
   - Low generalisability as all the participants were undergraduate psychology students
   - Demand characteristics as participants were psychology students and may have had some background information in what this study was aiming to test

Question 5

Tervesky and Kahenerman (1986)

Answer 5

Aim: To test the influence of positive and negative framing on decision-making
Participants: 307 self volunteering American undergraduate students

Procedure:
- To test the effect of a positive or negative frame on the participant’s decision-making, all participants were tasked with making a decision between two options in response to a hypothetical scenario towards a disease outbreak dealing with 600 people’s lives
- However, the participants would be randomly allocated to one of two conditions where the choices they could make would be framed in either a positive or negative frame

• In group 1 (the positive frame), the choices were as follows:
  Programme A: If adopted, 200 people will be saved
  Programme B: If adopted, there is a 1/3 chance that 600 people will be saved, but a 2/3 no one will be saved
• In group 2 (the negative frame), the choices were as follows:
  Programme C: If adopted, 400 people will die
  Programme D: If adopted, there is a 1/3 chance that everyone lives, but a 2/3 chance that 600 people will die

Results:
- In condition 1, 72% of the participants had selected programme A, and 28% of participants chose programme B
- In condition 2, 78% of participants chose programme D, and 22% chose Programme C

Conclusion: The results of this study showcase the effect that framing can have on the decision-making of individuals. When information framed positively (focused on saving lives), then people took the certain outcome over the less uncertain outcome. In contrast, if information was framed negatively (focusing on the deaths) then people would avoid the certain loss of lives and take a less certain option.

Evaluation:
1. Strengths:
- Random allocation of participants reduces individual differences of participants interfering with results
- Cause and effect relationship found
- High internal validity
- Standardised

• Low ecological validity
• Low generalisability
• Self volunteering participants introduce concerns about sample diveristy

Question 6

Brewer and Treyens

Answer 6

Aim: To investigate the** role of schema in the formation and retrieval of episodic memories **
Participants: 86 university psychology students

Procedure:
- All participants were asked to wait in a room that looked like an office while the researcher informed them to wait while they “checked to see to make sure the previous participant had completed the experiment”. This was deception, and in reality, the experiment had already begun
- The ‘office’ the participant was in was designed by the researchers, had items which were either congruent or incongruent with the schema of an office.
- All participants were seated in the same position in the office to have an equal vantage point/view of items in the office
- After a standardised time of 35 seconds, the researchers then called the participants into another room, where they would then have their memory of the items in the office tested in 1 of 3 conditions.
- The participants would tested by either a written recall followed by a verbal recognitions test, a drawing recall condition, or a verbal recognition only condition
- In the Writing recall followed by a verbal recognition condition, the participants were first asked to write a description of the objects in the room, where afterward, they would be asked to rank from 0-6 how confident they were that items presented in a booklet were in the room
- In the drawing condition, the participants were given an outline of the office and were asked to draw objects they recalled on the outline
- In the verbal recognition only condition, participants were tasked to simply say that out of a list of objects, whether they thought they were in the room or not.

Results:
- Participants, when asked to recall objects through the written recall or drawing recall condition, would be more likely to remember objects that were congruent with their schema of an office, and forget items which were incongruent with their schema of an office
- In the verbal recognition condition however, participants were able to recall objects which were in the room but incongruent with the schema of an office, however, were also more likely to misidentify congruent objects being the room, when in reality, they weren’t
- In the drawing and written recall condition, it was also seen that participants would adjust the position of objects they recalled to be more congruent with their schema of an office (e.g. if a notebook was located on a chair, the participants would recall that notebook being on a desk)

Conclusion: It appears that schema played a role in both the encoding and recall of the objects in the office.

Evaluation:
1. Strengths
- Internal validity as participants weren’t aware their memory was being tested as they are in the room
- High ecological validity as they are in a natural office setting
- Utilised the ‘incidental Learning Paradigm’

2. Weaknesses
   - Repeatability is compromised with the ethical concern of deception
   - Sample is not generalisable as it’s only psychology students

Question 7

Berry

Answer 7

Aim: To investigate the level of conformity of individuals from two distinct types of societies using the Asch Paradigm **
Participants: This study analysed 3 separate distinct cultures:** the Tenme who were collectivists, the Inuits who were individualistic, and the Scots as a reference group. Each group was made up of people who had never had a Western education and maintained the traditional way of life and people who were “in transition” - either having a Western education or employment. There were around **120 individuals per culture. **

Procedure:
- To test the level of conformity of these individuals, the researchers had used a design akin to the **Asch Paradigm **
- Participants would be brought into a room alone.
- For the first 2 tests, they were asked to select which line out of a set of 8 lines most closely reassembled a 9th line at the top of the set in terms of length
- After the first 2 trials, on the third trial they were informed that most people from their culture had believed a certain line out of the 8 to be the correct one (this was deception and false, however the ‘belief’ was correct)
- On the last 3 trials however, the same procedure as the 3rd trial was done however this time the answer said to be believed by the majority as correct was actually wrong

Results:
- The tenme, which were collectivist, had the highest rate of conformity when they were told that other tenme had ‘believed’ even though it was incorrect.
- The Inuit on the other hand had an even lowest rate of conformity
- There was no significant difference seen in the participants who were of the same culture but lead the more western lifestyle

Conclusion: This study provides evidence that the cultural dimensions of one’s culture, such as being individualistic or collectivist, can influence the behaviour of an individual of that culture.

Evaluation:
1. Strengths:
- Cause experiment helps improve internal validity of the experiment
- Used a reliable and used procedure, the ‘Asch paradigm’

2. Weaknesses
   - No cause effect relationship established as it was a quasi experiment
   - low ecological validity
   - Only applies to the cultural dimensions of the tenme, inuit, and scots