General psychology: contextual encoding experiment , Summaries of Physiology

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Chun,

General psychology:

contextual encoding

experiment

Psychology 100 Dr. Chun December 6th, 2017 Contextual Encoding Experiment Introduction The psychological phenomenon being studied here is memory encoding. Memory encoding is defined as forming associations to be able to use retrieval cues to remember information later. Attention and context affect encoding by changing what someone remembers. I hypothesized that subjects, the dependent variable, will only see objects, the independent variable, related to the condition they were assigned to. Subjects from the Costume Ball and Circus Act Conditions will each see four objects. Method I had eight subjects. Four were male and four were female. Four were Caucasian, two were Black, one was Hispanic, and one was Asian. The average age of my subject was 51. I randomly assigned my participants to groups by flipping a coin. If it was heads, they were assigned to the Circus Act condition, if it was tails, they were assigned to the Costume Ball condition. Four were assigned to each group, so the eighth participant was assigned to the Circus Act condition, where there was space. To complete this experiment, I showed the participants the same picture for three seconds, but told half of them it was a Circus Act and the other half a Costume Ball. I then asked them if they saw certain objects in the picture.