Answer 1:
Question 1. What is your Major?
I study cognitive psychology.
Question 2. What type of music would be the
most affective?
For certain types of tasks, music with lyrics is
more distracting than music without lyrics.
Question 3. Do you think my procedures are
correct?
Step 1. Get 10 people
Step 2. Get 10 groups of 10 mazes( same level
mazes).
Step 3. Have each person do a maze one-by-one
without music and time them.
Step 4. Repeat 5 times per person with a
different set of mazes for each trial.
Step 5. Record observations and data.
Step 6. Have each person do a maze one by one
with music.
Step 7. Repeat 5 times per person with a
different set of mazes for each trial.
Step 8. Record observations and data.
In this procedure you may have what is called
a "practice effect." This is when one
experimental group does better not because of
the experimental manipulation but because they
had more practice. In your procedure, it is
possible that the people listening to music will
solve the mazes faster because they just had
practice completing 5 mazes. In order to
eliminate the practice effect, you could give
half of your participants the mazes with music
first.
Question 4. What is your prediction of the
conclusion?
This is an interesting question. The memory
system that we use for this kind of
concentration is called working memory. Working
memory has two main parts for storage: one that
stores information about space (this is called
the visuospatial sketchpad) and one that stores
information about sound (this is called the
phonological loop). If neither of these parts is
overloaded then they don't interfere with each
other too much. In your case, the music would
use the phonological loop and the maze would use
the visuospatial sketchpad. It is possible that
if the music is not too distracting then it
would not affect the time it takes to finish a
maze. If the music is very distracting, however,
then it might make people take longer. One way
to make the music very distracting is to ask
people to sing along! Either way, I think you
have a good project.
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