RESEARCH SUMMARY A researcher is interested in the relationship between watching

Question

RESEARCH SUMMARY A researcher is interested in the relationship between watching TV and cognitive achievement. Cognitive achievement is the ability to learn and remember information. The researcher hypothesized that the more TV a person watched, the lower their performance would be on tests of cognitive achievement. To test this hypothesis, the researcher recruited eighty young adults who live alone. They put a video camera in the living room of the dwelling. The individuals only had a TV in the living room. They taped continuously for one week. Multiple research assistants coded how long each participant watched TV. They did not include times when the TV was on but no one was visibly watching it. They did not include times when someone was sitting in front of the TV but not paying attention to the TV. They then had each participant complete a task that measures working memory (one of our cognitive abilities). The task involved reciting the alphabet while also counting (A 1 B2C 3 D 4... etc) up to the total of 52 possible items Performance was coded by the number of correct items completed before an error was made. The researcher found that those who watched more TV performed worse on the task (r.31, p

Explanation / Answer

The researchers attempted to ascertain whether watching television was associated with decreased cognitive ability. Using a video camera, they taped 80 young adults living alone and counted the time spent on watching television. They then administered a working memory task to the participants, as an indicator of their cognitive ability. The results revealed that the more the time participants spent on watching television, the poorer was their perfect on the cognitive ability task.

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