Grant

• Background

  • information is encoded by being taken in by the senses and processed, the information is then stored until it is later needed at which point it is retrieved either by recall and recognition
• Aim

  • Investigate the effect of context - dependent memory, in recognition and recall tests on students
• Method

  • laboratory experiment
  • Independent measures design to look at noisy and silent study and tests environments to see if there was an effect on memory depending on:

  Whether the participant read a two page article in a noisy or silent condition

  Whether they were tested under matching or mismatched conditions
• Two IVs - study context and test context

  4 Conditions

  • silent - silent
  • silent - noisy
  • noisy - noisy
  • noisy - silent

  Dependent variable measures through either recall (short answer recall test score out of 10) or recognition (multiple choice answers marked out of 16)
• Sample

  39 participants that were aged 17-56, 17 were females and 23 males. Recruited by opportunity sampling by 8 psychology students who chose 5 each but one persons data was withdrawn which left 39 participants
• Design

  Each 8 participants tested 1 participant for each of the four conditions and an additional participants for a condition assigned by instructor. They randomly assigned participants to each of their 5 conditions
• Materials

  • each provided their own cassette player and headphones which were exact copies of a master tape of background noise recorded during lunchtime in a university cafeteria.
  • 2 page article on psychoimmunology
  • Recognition and Recall test
• Procedure

  1. PPts recruited and sat in a room, instructions describing experiment as class project and that participation was voluntary
  2. Asked to read article and were allowed to highlight and underline
  3. Informed comprehension would be tested and they all ore headphones as they read. Those in noisy condition told they would hear moderately loud background noise but that they should ignore and those in silent condition told thy wouldn't hear anything
  4. Break of approximately 2 minutes given at the end of the study phase to minimise recall from short term memory
• Procedure

  5. short answer test given followed by multiple choice test

  6. At the end of the testing phase, ppts debriefed concerning purpose of the experiment. procedure lasted about 30 minutes
• Results

  Reading time - time spent to read was roughly the same in all conditions do noise had no effect on that

  Mean scores in matching conditions were - silent - silent (78.2%) and noisy - noisy (75.7%). these were significantly higher than mismatching conditions

  Tells us we remember information more when the condition in which we study is the same in which we have to remember the information. Context dependent memory found improvements in matching conditions
• Explanations of results

  Studying and testing in the same environment leads to enhanced performance. Likely to perform best in results if they have minimum background noise
• Strengths

  • highly controlled laboratory experiment - increasing internal validity
  • Standardised so high reliability and replicability
  • mundane realism - higher in ecological validity
  • using student sample is an appropriate group to use
  • collect quantitative data
• Limitations

  • extraneous variables - eg other distractions in the rooms could've affected the results
  • Study may lack ecological validity as when students learn in real life they don't need to recall it a few minutes later. eating of learning materials didn't truly reflect assessment under typical examination conditions
  • Participants were psychology students and coddle been aware of the aim of the research, demand characteristics could've been displayed