loftus and palmer + grant

• Cognitive psychologists are concerned with internal mental processes
• Examples of behaviours cognitive psychologists would be interested in studying

  • Thinking
  • Attention
  • Perception
  • Memory
• Memory involves interpreting what is seen or heard, recording bits of it and then reconstructing these bits into memories when required
• Loftus and Palmer conducted many studies investigating ways in which memory can be distorted, many of which show the eyewitness testimony is unreliable as it can be influenced by many factors including the way in which a question is worded
• Schema theory

  Memory is influenced by what an individual already knows, and that their use of past experiences to deal with a new experience is a fundamental feature of how memory works
• Schema


  Simplified, general frameworks of everything an individual understands based on past experiences
• Loftus and Palmer experiment 1

  1. Participants shown 7 films of traffic accidents

  2. Participants given questionnaire after each clip to describe the accident and answer questions

  3. One critical question asked "About how fast were the cars going when they [verb] each other?"

  4. Each group received a different verb (smashed/contact/collide/hit/bumped)
• Loftus and Palmer experiment 2

  1. Participants shown a 1 minute film with a 4 second multiple car crash

  2. Participants given questionnaire to describe the accident and answer questions

  3. One critical question asked about speed, with different groups receiving different wording

  4. One week later, participants completed another questionnaire with a critical question about whether they saw broken glass (which was not in the original film)
• Grant (1998) was interested in determining whether environmental context-dependency effects would be found with the type of material and the type of tests typically encountered at school
• Grant et al aimed to show that environmental context can have a more positive effect on performance in a meaningful memory test when the test takes place in the same environment in which the to-be remembered material was originally studied (the matching condition) than when the test occurs in a different environment (mismatching condition)
• Grant et al experiment

  1. Participants read a 2-page article on psychoimmunology under either silent or noisy conditions (study context)

  2. Participants were then tested under either matching or mismatching conditions (test condition)

  3. Participants completed a short answer recall test and a multiple choice recall test
• The background noise for the noisy condition was a tape made in the university canteen at lunchtime, with the hum of conversation, occasional words or phrases but no audible sentences, and the sound of chairs and dishes
• The short answer test was always given to participants first, to ensure that material was being recalled from the article itself
• The background noise was played moderately loud through headphones (also worn by participants in the silent condition)
• The to-be remembered material was a two-page article on psychoimmunology which was interesting and understandable (but unfamiliar) to the participants
• Procedure

  1. Each participant was asked to read the article through once, highlighting or underlining if they want to

  2. Reading time was recorded but not controlled

  3. During reading, all participants wore headphones (with the tape playing in the noisy condition)

  4. After a 2-minute break, they asked the participants to answer the two tests

  5. The short answer test was always given to participants first, to ensure that material was being recalled from the article itself rather than from the information in the multiple choice test
• Retrieval

  Measured in two ways: recall (short answer test) and recognition (multiple choice test)
• Conditions

  • Study context: silent, Test condition: silent
  • Study context: noisy, Test condition: noisy
  • Study context: noisy, Test condition: silent
  • Study context: silent, Test condition: noisy
• There were individual differences in reading time
• There were no significant patterns for the individual variables, ie whether material was learned or retrieved in each of the environments made no difference to the short answer question test or the multiple choice question test results
• There was an interaction between study and test conditions. For both the short answer and multiple choice tests, performance was significantly better in matching conditions than in non matching conditions
• Grant used 39 participants, 17 female and 23 male
• The research method was an independent measures design
• The participants wore headphones
• The noise that came through the headphones for the noisy condition was a tape made in the university canteen at lunchtime
• The 2 page document was on psychoimmunology
• Participants had unlimited time to read the document
• There were 2 tests: a short answer test of 10 questions and a multiple choice test of 16 questions
• There were 4 conditions in the study