To eradicate most of the ethical issues in this investigation all participants will be asked for their consent and informed that they have the right to withdraw at any point before starting the experiment and when it is finished all subjects will be debriefed; if they are told at the beginning exactly what the investigation is about it could produce demand characteristics and thanked. They will remain anonymous and their results will be put into a table to make sure that they do remain nameless.
The apparatus used in this experiment will be 2 stimulus sheets, one with words and the other with words and pictures, a stop watch will be used to time the participants to make sure that there is no difference in the time each participant gets.
On Thursday participants will be collected from the dale head restaurant and asked if they would like to partake in a psychological experiment on learning. They will be asked to go into a quite classroom one by one. 30 of the participants will be given a sheet of paper with a list of words only on it, after three minutes the list will be taken away and the participant will be given a piece of plain paper and asked to recall as many words as possible within three minutes. The remaining 30 participants will be asked to do the same, however their stimulus will include pictures of the words on the list. To stop bias a set of standardised instructions will be told to every participant;
“On my word will you please turn over the sheets in front of you, the sheets contain words on which you will have 3 minutes to learn, after the time is up those sheets will be removed and you will have a further 3 minutes to write down as many of the words you can remember, this does not have to be in any particular order. Please remember that if at any part in the experiment you do not want to continue, you have the right to leave.”
After the experiment is finished the participants will be thanked and debriefed with another set of standardised instructions;
“thank you for taking part in an experiment into memory recall, your results will be kept anonymous”
The results will be gathered and recorded in table form.
The use of people of similar age means that the experiment was controlled for subject variablitly. Presenting stimulus materials to the participants under similar conditions shows that there has been an attempt to limit confounding variables. The experiment used standardised instructions and identical apparatus for each participant to prevent bias occurring. Ethical issues were addressed by giving each participant informed consent and they were assured that the study was confidential and their name would not at any point be used in the investigation.
Results
A table of individual results can be found in the appendix.
The results show that there is a difference of 22% between the amount who got it right with images and those recalled without images.
This supports our initial hypothesis that there would be a significant difference between the results we collected from those who had a list of words only and those who had a list of words with pictures to recall.
The mean, mode and median of conditions A and B show that there is a significanct difference between the average words recalled in each group. The range of A shows that there was a smaller difference on average of the results than the larger number of condition B which shows a bigger difference in each individuals results.
