Experimental research psychology paper (APA format)

Apparatus

The experiment consisted of solid plastic tablet arm desks, a pencil or pen, three sheets of counting stroop task paper and a stopwatch to measure the time.

Procedure

On November 25, 2017 at two different times first group at 3:45pm to 4:00pm and the second group at 4:08pm to 3:30pm in a classroom in the college building. The room the experiment took place in was quiet, the temperature was about 65 degrees, and it had florescent lighting. The first group was 11 participants and the second group was 10 participants. In this study, Participants were randomly distributed into two groups. Three sheets of paper were presented to the participants in every trial. The no distraction group went first. The participants were paired into groups of two, one person was the timekeeper and the other person did the task. In trail one the participants were asked to count the number in each row (name). In trail two were asked to count the number of x’s in each row (count). In trail three participants were asked to count the digits in each row (inhibited count). The control group went after however, they had music interference causing them to take an extended amount of time to complete the task. A factorial mixed ANOVA was ran in order to see if the no distraction group would score high oppose to the control group and, testing whether the music would make the distraction group score lower. The design of the experiment was a 2(group type: distraction and control) x 3(trail type: name, count, inhibited) and the dependent variable as the performance on trails.

Results

Mauchlay’s Test of Sphericity was significant, so sphericity was violated. Therefore, the Greenhouse-Geisser correction was used. There was no significant main effect of group type on performance, F(1,20) = 0.04, p=0.85. There was no significant interaction between group type and trial type F(1.42, 28.47) = 0.65, p=0.48. There was a significant main effect of trial type on performance, F(1.42, 28.47) = 105.34, p < .001. Performance for the name trial type (M = 12.09, SE = 1.26) was significantly easier than the count (M = 28.81, SE = 1.35, p < .001) and inhibited count (M = 29.04, SE = 1.12, p < .001), regardless of the group type. There was no significant difference between count and inhibited count (p=1.00). Overall, there was only a significant main effect of trial type on performance.

Discussion

References

Table

Summary of the distraction task

Note. The descriptive statistics table shows the total average time of trails one, two and three in the distraction and control group.

Bar Graph

Figure 1. Mean for time difference in the distraction task for control and distracted group. This table shows the amount of time the distraction group and control group took to finish. This table gives a clear visual of how the distraction group took the least amount of time oppose to the control group.