Discovering Statistics Lab Report - Essay Example

? Discovering Statistics Lab Report Affiliation This paper is based on a study about post-event information and theway it leads to misinformation. The study looks at the influence caused by forms of sentence surface on misinformation effects. In this paper the study is based on viewing a given film clip. In this case, the participants received a narrative on a post-event clip. The narrative described the film event fully. In the post-even narrative, critical sentences were presented either in the form of a statement or in the form of a question. The presentation contained misinformation rather than questions that reflected the original event. At the time of the final recall test, the participants were told that all relevant information that was presented within the post-event narratives was hardly in the actual event. They were therefore requested not to report such information. The experiment compared to previous findings to demonstrate that post-event information that is presented in the form of affirmative statement could produce the misinformation effect. It was also found that post-event information that is presented in the form of a question would always increase the ability of individuals to recall the correct information as well as promote the reduction of false recalls. This usually happens irrespective of whether the information constrains misleading or event studied items. The main findings of the study brought about a ruling that post-event information that is presented in the form of a question generates a condition that is similar to the testing effect. Background Many people who witness events often get information about such events even before having any chance to retrieve the fine details of the events. Typically, post-event information appears in various contexts in everyday life. Specific information about given events, which could include a specific name or even an object, are bound to reappear later in different occasions or in different places. Post-event information is also likely to take various forms. These different forms are said to generate the effect associated with tempering the accuracy of details about the original event. Loftus was the first individual to structure a standard experiment that was meant to examine the way memory reports about an event could be affected by post-event information effects. The paradigm in this case involved the basic phases. In this case participant started by experiencing an event, which could include watching a video or even some sequence of slides that depicts a relatively complex event. The second phase would then be a case whereby the participants receive some verbal information, which contains various suggestions that are misleading as far as the event details are concerned. To achieve this, participants have to be tested on their memory about the event. Misinformation effect is said to occur whenever the reports of the participants include more details that are suggested erroneously than the reports from the participants who hardly gets the misleading information. Typically, post-event information appears within the contexts of post-event questions or even the case of post-war narratives concerning the event witnessed. Misinformation effects mainly occur when such post-event narratives contain misinformation that wrongly reflects the event. It could as well occur when post-event questions are initiated with false presuppositions. In such cases, the misinformation could be contradictory specifically to the original events (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Deviating slightly from the work of Loftus, the daily experience by individuals are associated with cases of distorted information, which go to an extent of altering the way people think of events they had already witnessed. In everyday life, there are some cases when people are required to have their memory as sharp as possible. This requirement is hardly fulfilled in many cases due to the effect of memory distortion through distorted information. Even the case of eyewitnesses can hardly be perfectly upheld given that people look for further opinions about the events they have already witnessed. In such cases, the misinformation ends up being contradictory to the already witnessed events that should be held as original. This case could be reflected to the case of Loftus whereby participants witnessed a green car. The participants later received some misleading information. They ware for instance asked the way the car was fast but with reference to a different color such a white. The misleading question also included an aspect of misleading information about the actual location. The question in this case was reframed as, “How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn while traveling along the country road” Loftus, 1975)? This question brought in the aspect of color and location distortion. The car was green but the question referred to a white car. Again, there was hardly any barn in actual event. While the participants remember the details of the original event accurately, they were very likely to include false details such as white color and a barn, when the color was actually green and there was hardly any barn respectively. Past studies has largely tackled the case of post-event information and how it affects the ability of people in remembering the original events. The work of Loftus is very remarkable in this case. In his work, he used various experiments to indicate the way people could report on past events that they readily witnessed. These experiments were initiated with the use of control experiments in which some participants would report on the original events without having received any misleading information (Loftus, 1975). On the second information, the participants would receive misleading information about the past events, in which the information is meant to reflect some aspects that were hardly in the original event. In the case of the control experiment, participants are more likely to remember and report the complete event without any problems relating to wrong details about the original event. Methodology This section is about the methods and techniques used to carry out the study. The methodology involves aspects like data collection techniques, the research design, the sample used, and the analysis. All these are initiated to investigate the influences, which post-event information being presented in the form of a question may have on misinformation effect. In the study, post-event narratives that contain misinformation are used instead of making use of indirect questions that contain false presuppositions. Method The study follows a standard paradigm of post-event misinformation as well as manipulated forms of sentences that are presented in post-event narrative. Three sentence formats are used. These forms of sentences include affirmative, which has misleading information, a question having misleading information, as well as a question with the correct information. Participants are then told that all answers mentioned within the narrative were wrong and should hardly be reported. Study Design The participants in this study included 50 students from my class. The students participated voluntarily in order to get a chance to get the same feedback from other student in the attempt to fulfill part of their program requirements. Not all of them were majoring in psychology but had the subject as part of their program courses. The experiment involved a control item and a specific item, which had to be presented in their post-event narrative. The determinant factor was taken to be the form of sentence used. In this case, the sentences determining the results were a question having misleading items, a question having the studied items, and an affirmative statement is having a misleading items. Materials The study made use of a short film clip that depicted the daily morning routine of a typical college student. The film clip was in the form of two main versions. The first clip was taken to be the original clip while the second film was edited such that critical items in the original film clip were replaced mainly through the work of editing. The two films were identical, but for only eight critical items. The items in the case included a cleaning tool, chewing gum brand, cleansing cream brand, textbook type, eye-drops cap color, vehicle type, as well as newspaper name. In every sentence condition, 50 per cent of the participants received each of the two film versions. Procedure The procedure involved testing and randomly assigning them to one sentence out of the three forms of sentence conditions. Every session was done in phases. The participants had to view the clip and later listen to the recording, which described all the film events. A stipulated delay period of at least 6 hours, the participants were asked to fill in questionnaires and take a cued-recall test. The participants were asked to watch a short film about the daily morning tasks of a typical student in the campus. They were then required to listen to recorded diary by the film character, which described all activities that the character had initiated in that morning. In this case, they were informed that their memory about the film would be tested. This information was meant to increase their attention to the diary (Lindsay, 1990). The diary represented the post event information after which the participants filled a long questionnaire that was hardly related to the events. After this, they were asked to respond to questions about the films 8 critical items. Participants were asked to write down the answers as individuals. Results The results of the study were represented in a table as shown below: Table1: participants who recalled misleading items in the four phases Post-event items/ Sentence type # of the misleading items recalled (%) 1 2 3 4 Control item 25 0 0 0 Statement with misleading items 54 13 4 0 Control item 21 0 0 0 Question with misleading items 21 4 0 0 Control item 13 0 0 0 Question with studied items 8 0 0 0 Experiment 2 Control item 21 0 0 0 Statement with misleading items 29 21 4 0 Control item 21 0 0 0 Question with misleading items 25 4 0 0 The table depicts the rate of the participants recalling any of 1, 2, 3, and 4 misleading items. At least 70 per cent of the participants receiving misleading affirmative statements are found to recall at least an item that was misleading. About 25% of them recall at least an item given a misleading question. The percentage drops further in the case of questions containing the studied items. The table also presents the percentage rate of recalls of all misleading items as well as the studied items as depicted in different sentence types. From the table, it can be established that the recall rate diminishes from 1 to 4 across the table columns. Analysis The use of SPSS software program was applied to carry out the analysis. In order to fully examine the post-event information effect and the associated sentence type in the case of recalling the misleading items a 2 ? 3 ANOVA statistics was initiated on the study rate of misleading items. This was done by taking two times control items vs. specific item by three time affirmative statements having misleading items vs. a question having misleading information. From the analysis, it came out that effects of the types of items and the types of sentences were significant. In this case: F (1, 69) = 8.110 MSE= 0.015 P < 0.010 ?p2= 0.110 F (2, 69) = 12.000 MSE=0 .015 P < 0.001 ?p2=0.26 Again, the form of integration was found to be significant to the study. This was established as follows: F (2, 69) = 6.940 MSE= 0.015 P < 0.010 ?p2= 0.170 After this, a t-test was separately conducted. This was meant to structure the effect of misinformation for every of the three types of sentences. The analysis results are as follows: M= 23 {for the affirmative statement} M= 0.060 {control item} t (23) = 3.760 {for both cases}; t (23) Participants recall more correct items after receiving the control item than when receiving specific items. {P1>p2} Question with Correct Items M= 0.780 vs. M= 0.640 T (23) = 2.070 P1 < 0.05 {receiving specific items} M= 0.84 vs. M= 0.68 T (23) = 4.29 P2 < 0.001 {receiving control items} Discussion and Conclusion From the study, it was found that post-event information that is presented in the form of affirmative statement produced the misinformation effect. Post-event information made participants recall misleading items thereby impairing their recall abilities. When the misleading information is presented in the form of a question, the ability to recall the correct items is increased significantly. This happens despite whether it contains misleading information or the studied item. The case of misleading information makes individuals to falsely remember some additional details that are hardly in the original event. The participants include such details from their ideology and thoughts that they could have skipped some information by mistake. According to Frost (2000), people are more likely to include false information when asked to report about an event that they had originally witnessed given that the reporting is done after at least one week. The individuals in this case are found to face a problem of contradictory misinformation, which is generated by the misleading information they receive from other individuals about the same event. It is also found that whenever the false information appears to be the direct focus of a question asked by a second party, the distortion of the original information depends on the nature of the question. Usually, a presupposed question generates a greater influence on people’s notion about an event that they had originally witnessed. Given a case whereby participants of an experiment are asked whether they saw a bus in a film they were watching, this case may generate insignificant influence on their later reports about the original film event. In contrast, a presupposed question such as whether the individual saw some people boarding the bus could affect the individual memory about the event in which the likelihood of reporting falsely about the film would be relatively high (Loftus, 1975). Contradictory information about the film event eliminates the effect of misinformation and causes a spillover effect in which people would become increasingly resistant to some other misleading information (Loftus, 1975). Despite the availability of much work about the effect of misinformation, the examination of sentence influence with respect to the type of sentences in post-event narratives has hardly been perfected. It is argued that post-event information could sometimes appear in various forms such as a question, affirmative statements, or negative statements. Each of these different forms generates a different impact on remembering a certain event. Some misinformation effects are caused by the reduced ability of people to remember the details of a given event, errors resulting from information source confusion, as well as response biases. It was proposed by previous researchers that the effect of misinformation occur whenever the misleading information tends to overwrite the original information (Lindsay, 1990). This aspect results to a case whereby the original information is completely erased from one’s memory. Conversely, misinformation renders the original details less accessible, but the details still remain in memory. The effect of misinformation in this case may occur when the individual has certain difficulties in accessing the original information especially during a test. This aspect contradicts the relative ease of accessing more recent information (Christiaansen & Ochalek, 1983). Again, information obtained from different sources end up becoming integrated or even confused. In experiments of this kind, participants could incorrectly attribute their own memory concerning misinformation of the post-event to their original event memory (Lindsay, 1990). Response biasness can as well result to the misinformation effect. An instance would be a case whereby individuals who hardly perceive the original event’s critical information, but fail to notice any misinformation would in turn believe that such misinformation had occurred during the original event. References Blank, H. (2005). Another look at retroactive and proactive interference: A quantitative analysis of conversion processes. . Memory , 13, 200–224. Christiaansen, R. E., & Ochalek, K. (1983). Editing misleading information from memory: Evidence for the coexistence of original and post-event information. Memory & Cognition , 11, 467–475. Frost, P. (2000). The quality of false memory over time: Is memory for misinformation “remembered” or “known”? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review , 7, 531–536. Lindsay, D. S. (1990). Misleading suggestions can impair eyewitnesses’ ability to remember event details. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition , 16, 1077–1083. Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology ,7, 560–572. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science , 1, 181–210. Read More