AS OCR Cognitive psychology Loftus and Palmer
- Created by: Sara
- Created on: 18-12-12 21:24
Loftus and Palmer:
General aim:
The general aim is to test whether phrasing of questions about a car accident can alter a participants memory of the event.
Experiment 1
Aim:
The aim of experiment 1 is to see whatever using different verbs to describe a car crach can give different estimates of the cars when the crash take place.
Method:
Participants
- 45 students
- No age or gender were recorded
Design and procedure
- Labratory experiment
- Independent measures
- Participants watched 7 clips of car crashes
- After the participants were asked to write an account of the accident
- Then they answered a series of questions
- Only 1 question was impertant, rest was fillers
- That helps to make it harder to work out the aim of the experiment
- The critical question was: 'About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?'
Independent Varible (IV): The verbs in the critical question. The verbs (Levels of IV): 'Hit', 'contacted', 'bumped', 'collided' and 'smashed'.
Dependent Varible (DV): The mean estimate speed of the car.
Results:
- Quantitative data
- Estimate of the cars speeds did vary according to the verb used in the crictical question
- 'contacted' got the lowest estimate and 'smashed' got the highest.
Conclusions:
Participants estimates of the cars varied due to the different verbs used in the critical question. There was two possible reason for this:
- Response bias: When the participant don't know what to estimate, the verb give them a clue on how much they should estimate.
- Memory distortion Or the verb that was used in their qustion altered the participants memory of the event.
Experiment 2
Aim:
The aim of the second experiment was…
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