CLoA Outcome Link: Discuss how social or cultural factors affect one cognitive process (environment on memory)
I will be conducting my IA with Wilson Wu (Shout out!) in a few days. We have both decided to investigate the effect of background noise on memory encoding. More specifically, it will be the noise people hear in the cafeteria. Having gone through the experiment with the class, we feel quite confident that the experiment will garner the suitable information needed to produce a good discussion. However, for all those who are curious, here is what I am going to do.
Through this experiment, I am predicting that Condition 1 would remember more words than Condition 2. This is because through personal experience, I have felt that I worked better/ remembered better/ focused better when in silence, as opposed to doing work in the cafeteria. However, there are external factors in the cafeteria that may have led to me being less focused such as friends talking and the general banter happening in the atmosphere. This would have altered my chain of thought, disrupting and distracting me from doing work. Thus, this is one thing that must be considered in the discussion: ecological validity. The fact that the participants will be sitting in a room knowing they are being observed could produce the Hawthorne effect, or demand characteristics, where the results would be skewed compared to a parallel universe where the study was done naturally. Just by intuition, I feel I would not be distracted by background noise produced from a recording, considering there is no interesting conversation and the sounds and voices are not of my friends. As such, the results could possibly not differ by too much... Hoping it would so there would be an easy correlation for me to analyze though!
I will be conducting my IA with Wilson Wu (Shout out!) in a few days. We have both decided to investigate the effect of background noise on memory encoding. More specifically, it will be the noise people hear in the cafeteria. Having gone through the experiment with the class, we feel quite confident that the experiment will garner the suitable information needed to produce a good discussion. However, for all those who are curious, here is what I am going to do.
- Participants will be briefed and told that they would need to remember as many words as possible
- Participants would be given an information sheet, along with a consent form to sign
- Participants will be split into two conditions- a silent condition, and a background noise condition
- Participants in Condition 1 will be put into a room in silence for 2 minutes and given a list words
- Similarly, Condition 2 would be put into a room with background cafeteria noise
- Both groups will be allowed 2 minutes to write down every word they can remember
- Papers will be collected and results will be recorded into a table
Through this experiment, I am predicting that Condition 1 would remember more words than Condition 2. This is because through personal experience, I have felt that I worked better/ remembered better/ focused better when in silence, as opposed to doing work in the cafeteria. However, there are external factors in the cafeteria that may have led to me being less focused such as friends talking and the general banter happening in the atmosphere. This would have altered my chain of thought, disrupting and distracting me from doing work. Thus, this is one thing that must be considered in the discussion: ecological validity. The fact that the participants will be sitting in a room knowing they are being observed could produce the Hawthorne effect, or demand characteristics, where the results would be skewed compared to a parallel universe where the study was done naturally. Just by intuition, I feel I would not be distracted by background noise produced from a recording, considering there is no interesting conversation and the sounds and voices are not of my friends. As such, the results could possibly not differ by too much... Hoping it would so there would be an easy correlation for me to analyze though!