Psychology 2020L – Lab 2: Recognition and Recall Performance

Due: Mar. 22(A2&B2) & Mar. 24(C2)

University students are constantly faced with the task of writing exams. The nature of the exams not only differs in terms of the content, but it also differs in structure. Some exams are multiple choice in which students are required to select the correct answer from a variety of alternatives. Other exams are short answer in which students must recall information from memory in an attempt to answer the question appropriately. It is clear that these tests require students to tap their memory for the correct answers but they achieve this in different ways; multiple choice exams require students to simply recognize the correct answer, whereas short answer exams require students to use free recall to retrieve the appropriate response. Therefore, performance on such tests may depend on the nature of the tests themselves. In fact, there is evidence in the memory literature to suggest that performance on recognition tasks does differ from performance on recall tasks. However, the nature of the test is not the only factor that can influence performance on such tests. Delay between study and test has also been shown to affect test performance. However, does the effect of delay between study and test on memory performance vary depending on the nature of the test itself?

In this lab, we are going to determine if the impact that delay between study and test has on memory performance will differ depending on whether students are taking a recognition test or a free recall test of memory. Several members from the class participated in this experiment. Equal numbers of participants were assigned to each of four conditions. All of this information will now be entered into SPSS and you and your partner will conduct a 2x2 between-subjects ANOVA on the data. Be sure to think about your hypotheses BEFORE you conduct your analyses.

After you have analysed the data, you and your partner must complete a full APA write up of the experiment. You will be required to include a Title Page, Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, and Reference section. You should include the SPSS printouts in an Appendix. Also, please provide a bar graph that illustrates the data for the four conditions.

For the introduction you need a minimum of 3 articles to serve as background for your lab. Remember to state your hypotheses. For the method section, remember to note how we got our participants, how they were assigned to groups, and describe both the materials we used and the procedure that we followed for the experiment. Remember to report important details that other experimenters would need to know to replicate our experiment. For the results, indicate the findings and report the statistics in proper APA format. For the discussion section, do not forget to discuss the implications of your findings as well as how they fit into the literature and indicate if they supported your hypotheses. Don’t forget to cite your references in an APA style reference page. Finally, make sure that you include the bar graph as a Figure and provide the SPSS printouts in an Appendix.