A researcher wanted to investigate whether retroactive interference affects the forgetting of foreign language vocabulary. He recruited a group of participants to perform two paired-associate learning tasks in a controlled laboratory test booth.
Task A – Participants had 3 minutes to memorize a list of 15 English-French word pairs (e.g., apple – pomme).
Task B – Immediately afterwards, participants had 3 minutes to memorize a list of 15 English-Spanish word pairs (e.g., apple – manzana).
During both tasks, the words were presented on a screen under standardized lighting and timing conditions. After a brief distractor task, participants were tested on their recall of the French words from Task A.
The investigation of forgetting outlined above was a laboratory experiment.
Explain one strength of a laboratory experiment. Refer to the investigation above in your answer.
32 exam-style questions on AQA A Level Psychology Experimental method. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.