An experiment was conducted to investigate the impact of environmental noise during coding on long-term memory retrieval.
In the study, 10 participants in Group A ('Noisy condition') studied a list of 20 abstract nouns while background café noise was played. Simultaneously, 10 different participants in Group B ('Quiet condition') studied the exact same list of 20 nouns in a silent room.
After a 10-minute distractor task, all participants in both groups were tested on their recall of the 20 nouns under quiet conditions. The raw scores (out of 20) are shown in Table 1 below.
Table 1: Number of nouns correctly recalled from the list
| Group A (Noisy) | Group B (Quiet) |
|---|---|
| 9 | 14 |
| 8 | 13 |
| 11 | 15 |
| 10 | 12 |
| 7 | 14 |
| 9 | 16 |
| 10 | 13 |
| 8 | 15 |
| 12 | 11 |
| 11 | 14 |
What is the most appropriate measure of central tendency for calculating the average of the scores, from Table 1, in each of the two groups? 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.