Practical Investigation - Does STM encode acoustically

• Aim of my cognitive practical Investigation

  To investigate the acoustic similarity of words and the effect on short term memory. And the hypothesis was ‘Is it easier to remember acoustically similar or acoustically dissimilar sounding words?’  
• Procedure of my cognitive practical Investigation (ethical considerations)

  • We made a slideshow with a consent form at the start stating that if you do not consent don’t do the test and just watch. 
  • Then at the end we gave them a debrief stating what we were testing and if they has any worries to say and we can withdraw their results 
• Procedure of my cognitive practical Investigation (testing)

  • The slideshows started with some maths sequence puzzles which we used as a distractor task 
  • then we showed the 10  acoustically similar words (each for 5 seconds) and then at the end asked our ppts to put them into order 
  • Then we has some more maths puzzles as a distractor task 
  • Then we showed a list of 10 acoustically dissimilar words (showing each for 5 seconds) and then at the end asked our ppts to put them into order 
• Procedure of my cognitive practical Investigation (Sampling)

  • We used random sampling to select random people in our year group and got 7 people. (3 boys and 4 girls) 
  • It was repeated measures
• Procedure of my cognitive practical Investigation (Data Analysis)

  I used a Wilcoxon test by working out the difference between each participant's acoustically similar correctly ordered words and each participant's acoustically differently correctly ordered words. Then I ranked the difference in recall from highest to lowest and totalled the ranks up and found that my total score was insignificant because it was higher than the value on the Wilcoxon table 
• Conclusions of my cognitive practical Investigation

  Our results showed that the recall of acoustically similar words were easier to recall than acoustically dissimilar words when looking at the mean but however when we did the Wilcoxon test we realised there wasn’t a significant difference.
• Findings of my cognitive practical Investigation

  We found that people find acoustically similar words are easier to remember but our results were found to be insignificant after we did a Wilcoxon test. As our total of our negative results was 21 and this was found to be insignificant we when did a Wilcoxon test. However our mean was acoustically similar mean = 7.43 and the acoustically dissimilar mean = 5.14 showing that people found it easier to remember the acoustically dissimilar words on averarge.