A perceptual psychologist speculated that people can identify letters faster if

Question

A perceptual psychologist speculated that people can identify letters faster if they are surrounded by other letters in real words compared to letters in meaningless combinations. For example, people should recognize the letter c in the word doctor faster than c in the letter string tocdor.   He created a letter identification task where the stimuli were identical except in one condition the target letter was embedded in a word and in a second condition the letter was embedded in scrambled letters.   He created 200 stimuli, half of which were word trials and half were scrambled trials.   Thirty subjects participated in the study.    He assigned the first 15 subjects to sign up for the study to the word condition and the second 15 to the scrambled condition.   Reaction time was measured for each trial.   He hypothesized that reaction times would be faster for the word condition. He performed a two-tailed t-test on the average reaction times for each group at the =.05 level. He found that the mean reaction time for the word condition was significantly faster than for the scrambled condition.

What type of research design was used? What were the independent and dependent variables? How were subjects assigned to levels of the independent variable? Was there a possible confound in the study? Assume that word vs. scrambled context has no effect on people’s ability to identify letters. What type of error did the experimenter make? Can you think of ways to improve the study?

Explanation / Answer

Research Design:-

Data collection: Data is collected by experiment by making the subjects to study the words.

Instruments used: Scrambled Words and normal words, it is employed by making the subjects to read.

Variables:-

Independent Variables: Subjects

Dependent Variable: Words which makes the subjects speed of identification of letters inside the word

There are two levels of independent variables, 15 subjects who read normal words and other 15 subjects who read scrambled words.

Possible confound would be the subjects whose ability to interpret the scrambled words quicker and in case the scrambled word become easier to identify the words then it will become biased.

If people ability to identify the letter in identical in the experiment then it will be type I error.

Both sets of subjects should be similar then the experiment won't get biased and words used in the experiment should be tougher in the same scale so that actual average shall be identified.

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