Studies Flashcards
Hughes’ policeman doll study (1978)
Aim: See if children can see things from another persons POV at an earlier age than piaget suggested
Method: 30 children aged between 3.5-5 were shown a model of two intersecting walls. The policeman doll was placed on the model. Children were asked to hide another doll so the policeman could not see him. The policemen was then placed in different positions on the model and the child was asked to hide the boy each time. Then a second policeman doll was introduced and the child was asked to hide the doll again. This was repeated three times
Results: 90% of the children aged between 3.5-5 were able to hid the doll from both policeman
Conclusion: Children aged between 3.5-5 can see things from another persons POV is the situation is familiar to them.
McGarrigle and Donaldson’s naughty teddy study (1974)
Aim: to see if children developed conservation skills at an earlier age than piaget found, if the change to the materials was accidental
Method: 80 children aged 4-6 were shown two rows of counters and asked if there was the same amount in each row. Then naught teddy messed up one of the row of counters. The messed up row was spread out too look longer than the other row. The experimenter pretended to be really cross with teddy. Then the children was sled if there were the same amount of counters in each row
Results: 62% of the 4-6 year olds stated there was still the same amount of counters. This is compared to the 16% of 4-6 year olds in piagets study
Conclusion: Children younger than 7 years can conserve is the change is accidental.
Murdock’s serial position curve study (1962)
Aim: to provide evidence for the existence of separate short term and long term stores of memory
Method: Participants in a lab experiment had to learn a list of 20 words that were presented to them, one at a time, for two seconds per word. Then they had to recall as much of the list as they could, in any order, in 90 seconds.
Results: The words at the end of the list were recalled first. The words at the start of the list were also recalled well, however the words in the middle of the list were recalled poorly and with difficulty.
Eval. of Murdock’s serial position study
:) Murdock’s use of a distracter task also confirms Murdock’s conclusions on the existence of the STM and LTM. This is because the distracter task took up the capacity of the STM.
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:( The tasks in the study were artificial. This is because, remembering lists of words isn’t an everyday activity. Therefore it can be argued that this study lacks ecological validity.
Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts’ study (1932)
Aim: To see if people, when given an unfamiliar story to remember, would alter the information so that it makes more sense to them.
Method: Each participant was asked to read a story called ‘War of the Ghosts’ twice. About 15 minutes later, they were asked to retell the story to another person. That person then had to retell it to the next and so on. A record was made of the story that each person told, allowing Bartlett to know what the changes were from one person to the next.
Results: The passages became shorter, there were a lot of omissions, there were changes to the detail, the order of events was changed
Conclusion: our memory is not an exact copy of what we hear. It is distorted by what we know about the world (Memory is influenced by our own beliefs)
Eval. of Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts’ study
:) His study is more relevant to the way we use our memory in everyday life, than studies that involve learning lists of words. This means his findings have a higher ecological validity than those of most other studies.
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:( Psychologists criticized the participants used in the study as they all were studying English at Cambridge. It was argued that they were likely to be better at reading and verbalizing stories than most other people, therefore Bartlett’s sample of participants is not very representative of the target population.
Gilchrist and Nesberg’s need and perceptual change study (1952)
Aim: To see how motivation affects perception
Method: 26 university students volunteered to go without food for 20 hours. They were randomly allocated into two groups (one with food & one without). Participants were shown pictures of meals on a screen for 15 seconds each. They were shown the same pictures again and told that the image would be different and they would have to adjust the brightness with a knob. They were tested at 6 and 20 hours
Results: As the experimental group went hungrier, they judged the pictures to be brighter whereas the control group showed very little difference in their perception of the pictures
Conclusion: Hunger affects the way that we perceive food which suggests that motivation affects perception
Eval. of Gilchrist and Nesberg’s need and perceptual change study
:) Lab experiment (high control)—> high internal validity
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:( Little number of participants (not representative of target population—> reduces generalizability of results produced
Bruner and Minturn’s perceptual set study (1955)
Aim: to see how expectations can affect perception
Method: 24 uni students were flashed letter of numbers fast, and then increasing at 20 milliseconds each time. The participants were asked to draw the letter or dumber as son as they recognized it.
The stimulus was a broken b which could be seen as a B or 13. Half the participants were shown four letters and then the stimulus. Then they were shown numbers followed by the stimulus. Then they were shown a mixture of letters and numbers then the stimulus. The other half of participants were counterbalanced.
Results: Most of the participants drew a 13 when they were expecting a number to come up and a B when they were expecting a letter.
Conclusion: Expectations affect how they interpret things
Eval. of Bruner and Minturn’s perceptual set study
:( Lab environment (behavior is not reflective of real life behavior)—> less ecological validity
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:( Sample size too small—> not able to generalize results
