Quiz 1 Review

You want to conduct a study about the effect of music on persistence on a boring task. You decide that your within-subjects IV will be "music playing" or "no music" (control) and that your DV will be the amount of time spent on a boring task (e.g., filing papers). For half of the experimental session, music will be playing. What other thing is required for this study?

Counterbalance presentation order of 'music' versus 'no music' across participants

Driving speed is a quantitative variable and predicting that red cars are more likely to get traffic tickets is a causal prediction.

False

In a true experiment, participants are NOT randomly assigned to conditions.

False

Which is an IV and DV? Viewing comedies (_____) makes people say more jokes (_____) People jog less (_____) when they were alone than when accompanied (_____) People type faster (_____) when they are accompanied by others (____)

IV and DV; DV and IV; DV and IV

Match the dependent measure to the correct kind of design. Studying changes in one subject over long periods of time (e.g., months) Effects from nutrition, medicine, metabolic effects, therapeutic interventions, or skill learning Naming pictures of line drawings of everyday objects (e.g., KITE)

Longitudinal design Between-subjects design Within-subjects design

If you designed a study to investigate whether subjects are faster at recognizing animals than tools, how many stimuli would you have per condition?

More than 40

Pavlov and Skinner came across important discoveries accidentally. One of the morals of these stories is that, when fortunate enough to stumble upon a great, 'serendipitous' discovery, one should...

NOT get sidetrack and continue with one's initial research

Which is an example of empirical support—rather than theoretical support—for the hypothesis that yawing is contagious (i.e., that people imitate yawning automatically)?

On average, people imitate yawning 80% of the time

What is a problem with theories that suggest the existence of a homunculus (i.e., a little observer) in the nervous system (e.g., that something in the brain 'views' the sensory patterns in the visual cortex)?

The homunculus, too, will need a nervous system with its own little homunculus, ad infinitum

An interaction

The pattern of results in figure below suggest that there was

When designing a new study, it is preferable to...

base as much as possible on established, published approaches/techniques/methods

If, for the experimental stimuli, the subject must perform one action (e.g., object naming) but, for the control stimuli, the subject must perform a different option (e.g., object counting), then one should employ a _______________ design.

blocked

Tim conducted a color-naming study and found that coffee did not influence naming latencies. He concluded that coffee does not affect color-naming. His collaborator disagreed, stating that one cannot draw conclusions from 'null' findings, because the experiment may have been poorly designed and 'insensitive,' or because color-naming is so easy that, with respect to accuracy, it leads to ___________ effects.

ceiling

One potential confound of cross-sectional designs are ________ effects. (The answer consists of only one word.)

cohort

Using classical conditioning, John concluded that his turtle could tell the difference between his iPod music from the 1970's and that of 1990's. All songs were played at the same iPod volume setting. Unbeknownst to him, songs recorded in 1990s were 'recorded louder' in the studio than those of the 1970s. Hence, 'volume' is still a potential ______________ in his experiment

confound

Wanting to examine 'optimism,' Bill conducted a study in which optimism was measured as the number of times that people travel without an umbrella. Some may argue that Bill's study suffers from a lack of

construct validity

If, in a within-subject design, one condition influences the subsequent condition (an order) effect, then one should __________________________ the condition across subjects.

counterbalance

In a within-subjects design, if half of the subjects were exposed to the experimental treatment during the first half of the session, then the other half should be exposed to the same treatment during the second half of the experiment. This is control technique is known as

counterbalancing

To test that caffeine increases speech rate, Sue used a between-subjects design in which both conditions were matched in all respects except the administration of caffeine. What should participants drink in the control condition?

decaffeinated coffee

Which of the following is the dependent variable? In an experiment, people ate less when accompanied than when alone.

eating less

Ted's laboratory study about affection explains affectionate behaviors out in the real world. Thus, it could be said that his study is

ecologically-valid

In the example in class, that the crow could fashion a fishing hook was an ____________________________ that not all intelligent behavior is dure to trial-and-error.

existence proof

When one manipulates aspects of the world in order to observe an event (an observation) that is normally not observable, one has conducted an

experiment

It is important for confederates (aka 'stooges') in your experiment to be unaware of experimental treatment that the participant is receiving. Knowing the condition may make the confederate act in ways that increase the likelihood of finding a spurious effect. For example, the confederate may influence the participant to act in certain ways. This would mean that the study suffers from ____________________.

experimenter bias

For a hypothesis to be scientific, it must be

falsifiable

If you were designing a study to see whether subjects name plants more quickly than they name animals, and there were 40 "animal" trials and 40 "plant" trials, would you use a blocked or fully randomized design?

fully randomized

In the following, which is the independent variable? "Hearing classical music makes people tip more at restaurants."

hearing classical music

Joe cannot see the scratch on his contact lens because...

it is a stabilized retinal image and receptors can only detect changes in stimulation

To cure his shoulder pain, Paul drank the special tea Bye Bye Shoulder Pain, which is made of boiled cellulose and possesses no medicinal properties whatsoever—it is as medicinally effective as water. Nevertheless, Paul reported that he felt a lot better after drinking this tea. This could be a __________________ effect.

placebo

The idea that how a system functions could be understood by looking at the functional relationships amongst the parts of the system is known as

reductionism

Unpredictably, Joe's experiment 'works' and supports his hypotheses on some days but not others. It is fair to conclude that his experiment lacks

reliability

Doctors often measure one's weight. If a doctor's scale is not calibrated properly, such that zero does not actually equal 0 lbs., then the scale may always weigh one the same way and be _______________ but it won't measure what it is supposed to measure, so it will lack ___________________.

reliable; validity

Which theory is best? A theory that is...

simple and elegant and explains the same 85% of the observations

Change blindness demonstrates that, contrary to our intuitions, one is...

substantially less aware of the objects composing a visual scene

To test the hypothesis that the game Simon Says improves children's working memory performance (WMP), researchers measured WMP before and after children played the game for an intervention lasting three weeks. They found that WMP did improve following this intervention, yet no one wanted to publish their research report. This was most likely because

the experimenters did not account for the variable time - maturational changes alone could have yielded the effect, as children's WMP does improve with age

To test the hypothesis that the game Simon Says improves children's working memory performance (WMP), researchers measured WMP before and after children played the game for an intervention lasting three weeks. They found that WMP did improve following this intervention, yet no one wanted to publish their research report. This was most likely because...

the experimenters did not account for the variable time - maturational changes alone could have yielded the effect, as children's WMP does improve with age

Sue observed that the more money people have, the bigger are the amounts (chunks) that they pay. She concluded that having a lot of money makes people spend more. What is wrong with this conclusion?

the observation is correlational

Ice cream sales predicts the number of boating accidents, probably because...

there is a third variable (e.g., warm temperature) affecting both things

In a study employing a design that is 2 x 2 x 3, there are...

three factors, the first with two levels, the second with two levels, and the third with three levels

If you designed a study to examine the effects of listening to music on the performance of a boring task, what design features would your study have?

within-subjects design, counterbalancing