Question

A psychologist is interested in the effect of auditory distractors on performance in hand-eye coordination tasks. She gathers a group of subjects and randomly divides them into four groups. All of the subjects then play a video game requiring substantial ongoing hand-eye coordination. The game internally scores the subject’s hand-eye coordination performance but does not adjust its difficulty based on subject performance. At the end of the testing period, the software produces an overall hand-eye coordination score for that subject which is logged by the psychologist as data. Of the four groups, Group A plays the game in silence, Group B plays the game with appropriate sound effects that are appropriately timed, Group C plays with similarly appropriate sound effects except that they are asynchronously timed with respect to the video (that is, the sounds come at the wrong times with respect to the video). Group D plays the game with an entirely unrelated soundtrack (that is, none of the sounds in the soundtrack are related to anything going on in the video). How should you analyze these data in order to determine which, if any, of these treatments affect hand-eye coordination? That is, which statistical test(s) should you use, and why? Identify the factor(s)/independent variable(s), its/their levels, and the dependent variable. Provide enough detail so that it is clear that you know what you are talking about. You may assume homogeneity of variance, and that the sample size is large enough to assume normality of the distribution of sample means.

Answer 1