Abnormal Psychology (Thursday, 1:00 p.m., 12/15/2005)

[romanywitch]

There is a note on the whiteboards:

Sign in and go work on your experiments. By next Tuesday, I need the following answers as the completion of your final project:

1. What were your results?
2. Did the majority of your results (more than 50%) match your hypothesis and predicted result? Please include at least one example. (OOC: A link is OK if you don't want to write it out.)
4. If your results did not match your predicted result, what would you change about your experiment?
5. What did you like or dislike about the experiment you chose?


OOC: I was going to have you guys do a paper, but hopefully this is easier. Please post your results in this thread by next Tuesday. I'll post final grades on Wednesday. There'll be a comment thread for link drops if you have them, and those will increase your final fake score.

OCD comment threads coming shortly are sort of up. Some of them aren't showing up, and I don't know why. If a bunch of threads all titled the same suddenly show, now you know why.

Comments

Re: Experiment Summary

[anextimeagent.livejournal.com]

For time_agent and the4thsister:

Hypothesis: Competitiveness increases retention

Experiment: Two groups. Both groups are given a list of words to memorize
for a set amount of time. The list is then taken away. One group (the
control group) is asked to recite as many of the words on the list that
they remember. The other group is asked the same thing, but at the
beginning of the experiment were also given some sort of tangible object
(bean, poker chip, etc.) equal to the number of words on the list. They
are told that for every word missed (either forgotten or misremembered),
they will lose one of their chips. Whoever has the most chips at the end
"wins".

Expected result: The second group will display a statistically higher
ability to retain the list of words.

Tasks - Change the toughness of words the group have to remember, ie
really simple words, cat, dog etc and harder works like hypothermia etc-
would the harder words stick out more and be remembered more easily or
the easy ones since they're more well know? My guess simple words would
be remembered more.

Difficult Words - Hypothermia, Physiology, Concrete, Sedative,
Predicament, Laminate, Vocabulary, Condemnation, Sanctuary, Hypocrite,
Exaggerate, caffeinate, encyclopaedia, dinosaur, tentative, legislation,
participation, progressive, appropriate, spontaneous

Easy Words - Cat, Bag, Lost, Why, House, Car, Blue, Sing, Ball, Frog,
Shirt, hot, big, lick, crime, you, pen, sexy, play, light.

Findings- We found that the chance of winning a prize did not
significantly improve the number of words recalled, the most interesting
thing we found during out experiment was that at least one of the
participants made use a mnemonics to remember all 40 words (20 in the
easy set, 20 in the difficult), this gives us clues about how memory
works, though does not say anything about whether the participants
competitiveness affected this.

Also most people remembered more of the easy words than the difficult
ones as I expected, although it seems that the suggestion that the hard
words would stand out more and thus may be recalled more easily
was true for one participant who recalled all 20 but forgot 2 of the easy
words.