A psychologist investigated the effect of divided attention on memory recall. She obtained a volunteer sample of 40 undergraduate students by placing an advert on the university virtual learning environment. Crucially, she wanted to see how background distraction affects the ability to recall a word list.
Condition 1: Participants memorised a list of 50 words while listening to loud, unpredictable background speech (high-distraction condition).
Condition 2: Participants memorised the same list of 50 words in a completely silent room (low-distraction condition).
Immediately after learning, each participant was asked to write down as many words as they could remember. The psychologist recorded the number of words correctly recalled and the number of words incorrectly recalled (errors/intrusions).
The median number of correct and incorrect recalls for each condition was calculated. The results are shown in Table 1.
Table 1 The median number of correct and incorrect recalls in the two conditions
| High-distraction condition | Low-distraction condition | |
|---|---|---|
| Median number of correct recalls | 14 | 38 |
| Median number of incorrect recalls | 36 | 12 |
What can the psychologist conclude from the results in Table 1?
Justify your answer.
235 exam-style questions on AQA A Level Psychology Data handling and analysis. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.