Question

A perceptual psychologist speculated that people can identify letters faster if they are surrounded by other letters in real words compared to letters in meaningless combinations.   For example, people should recognize the letter c in the word doctor faster than c in the letter stringtocdor.   He created a letter identification task where the stimuli were identical except in one condition the target letter was embedded in a word and in a second condition the letter was embedded in scrambled letters.   He created 200 stimuli, half of which were word trials and half were scrambled trials.   Thirty subjects participated in the study.    He assigned the first 15 subjects to sign up for the study to the word condition and the second 15 to the scrambled condition.   Reaction time was measured for each trial.   He hypothesized that reaction times would be faster for the word condition.  He performed a two-tailed t-test on the average reaction times for each group at the ?=.05 level.  He found that the mean reaction time for the word condition was significantly faster than for the scrambled condition.

What type of research design was used?

What were the independent and dependent variables?

How were subjects assigned to levels of the independent variable?

Was there a possible confound in the study?

Assume that word vs. scrambled context has no effect on people’s ability to identify letters.  What type of error did the experimenter make?

Answer 1

1) It is a type of qualitative research design.

2) Here independent variables are the subjects and dependent variable are the words and scrambled contexts because the effects of which brings changes into the research study results.

3) Subjects were assigned 50 percent for words and rest 50percent for the scrambled texts.

4) Yes , here possible confound is the merits of the subjects which is not taken into the account.

5) Here it is logical errors because we all know that humans mind is complex in nature and merits also differs due to the notches in the brains, which experimenter did,nt taken into account .