Loftus and Palmer
Experiment 1
- 45 American students, five groups of nine
- Watched several videos, some contained a car crash
- Asked how fast they thought the car was going with a critical words ( bumped, contacted, hit, collided, smashed )
- Clear indication that the increased severity of the verb caused ppts to give a higher estimation of speed because;
- memory alteration
- response bias
Loftus and Palmer
Experiment 2
- First part was similar to experiment 1, ppts only watched one video of a car crash and were asked a question with a critical verb
- The critical verbs were ( hit, smashed ), one group (the control) were not asked the critical question
- A week later, ppts were asked if they saw broken glass (there was no broken glass in the video)
- The severity of the verb influenced ppts speed estimates and whether they remember seeing broken glass
- This suggests that leading questions influence a persons memory to the point where they will claim to have seen things that weren’t there
Loftus and Palmer
Conclusion
Loftus and Palmer concluded that our memory is made up of two elements;
* Our original perception of the event
* External information supplied afterwards
Over time, these elements merge together and eventually we cannot tell what we originally saw and what information we obtained afterwards
Loftus and Palmer
Linking to areas of psychology
They key theme for this was ‘memory’
- The study gives us objective, quantitative data on how memory can be influenced by other external factors (language)
- Clearly cognitive, memory is a cognitive mental process, as this study investigated how language affects memory, it can be put into the cognitive area of psychology
Grant
Context dependent memory
The content dependent memory effect occurs when the memory of the to-be-remembered information is better tested in the same context in which the material was learned (matching condition) than when tested in a different context (mismatching condition)
Grant
Method
The independent variables were;
* whether the ppts read the two page article in silence or noisy conditions
* whether the ppts were tested under matching or mismatching conditions
The dependent variables were;
* a short multiple choice test of 10Q’s
* a multiple choice recall test of 16Q’s
Grant
Sample, materials and procedure
Sample
- 39 ppts aged 17 to 56 years (mean=23.4)
- 17 females 23 males
- opportunity sample, recruited by 8 psychology students who served as experimenters
Procedure
- standardised instructions were given and emphasised that their participation was voluntary
- ppts were asked to read the article once, highlighting and underlining if they wanted
- all ppts wore headphones as they read
Materials
- cassette player and headphones
- the to-be-remembered material
Grant
Conclusion
- there are context- dependency effects for newly learned meaningful material. Studying and testing in the same environment leads to enhanced performance
- there was no overall effect of noise on performance
- students are likely to perform better in exams if they study in a quiet environment
Moray
Experiment 1
- ppts had to shadow a piece of prose that they could hear in one ear (attended message)
- in the other ear a list of words was being read out (rejected message)
- ppts completed s recognition task
- ppts were shown 21 words, which were spilt into three categories (7 from shadowed message, 7 from rejected message, 7 not found in either passage)
- ppts had to choose the words they recognised from the shadowed passage
Conclusion
- ppts are more able to recognise words from the shadowed passage. Almost none of the words from the rejected passage were able to break the inattentional barrier
Moray
Experiment 2
- ppts shadowed ten passages of fiction
- the rejected passage contained instructions at the beginning and six out of ten had instructions throughout
- there was non- affective cues (all right, you can stop now)
- there was affective cues (John smith, you can stop now)
Conclusion
- ppts were more likely to hear instructions from the affective cues than non- affective cues
