Evaluate cognitive practical
investigation (8)
One strength of my practical investigation is that it was reliable. 2 groups of participants were
split into 2 groups who had to recall either a list of acoustically similar or dissimilar sounding
words. Each group had 20 seconds to learn the list assigned and 30 seconds to recall it in
any order after the screen went blank. The words in each list had a similar syllable length so
that the difficulty level for every participant was the same as they take up an equal amount of
space in short term memory. This means that the findings are more likely to be due to the
acoustic similarity or dissimilarity of the words rather than the number of words. This allows
the findings of both groups to be compared to determine whether the recall of acoustically
similar or dissimilar words was easier or not. This is a strength as this increases the validity
of the results since the chance of extraneous variables is reduced through the use of
controls. However, recalling a list of words does not reflect everyday use of memory as they
are not related to real life memory tasks. This means that the results may lack ecological
validity and may not be applied to other settings besides the laboratory.
One weakness of my practical investigation is that it may lack generalisability. The aim was
to investigate the effect of acoustic similarity on short term memory. The mean for the
number of acoustically similar words was 6.2, whilst for the number of acoustically dissimilar
words was 6.6. The results from Mann-Whitney U test showed that there was no significant
difference between acoustic similarity and recall in short term memory, thus accepting the
null hypothesis. A small sample size of 10 college students was used, which limits the
generalisability of the findings. This is because individual differences in the participants, such
as an unusually good memory, may have a greater effect on the findings than if a larger
sample was used. However, participants were randomly allocated to the 2 conditions so as
to equally distribute individual differences. This may improve the generalizability of the
findings considering that memory works in a similar way in most people due to the shared
brain structure.
In conclusion, my practical investigation aimed to determine the effect of acoustic similarity
in short term memory through measuring the number of acoustically similar or dissimilar
words recalled in the 2 groups of participants. The standardised procedures were the same
for all participants, therefore the results can be considered reliable. However, they may lack
validity because recalling a list of words may not resemble real life memory tasks. To
improve the ecological validity of this study, a shopping list may be used to assess recall as
this is a more ordinary real life task, meaning that the findings have more mundane realism.
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