Grant et al. (1998)

Question 1

Aim

Answer 1

To find whether context dependent memory is involved in learning.

Question 2

Sample

Answer 2

8 members of a psychology laboratory class served as experimenters. Each experimenter recruited five acquaintances to serve as participants.

There were 39 participants ranging in age from 17 to 56 with a mixture of males and females.

Question 3

Procedure

Answer 3

This was a laboratory experiment using an independent measures design.
The independent variables (IVs) were:

1. whether the participant read the two page article under silent or noisy conditions
2. whether the participant was tested under matching or mismatching conditions. Therefore there were 4 conditions.

The dependent variable (DV) was the participant’s performance on (a) a short-answer recall test and (b) a multiple-choice recall test.

Each participant wore headphones. Those in noisy conditions listened to the background noise of a cafeteria which consisted of occasional distinct words/phrases and movement of chairs and dishes.
The participants read an article on psychoimmunology and afterwards completed a multiple choice and a short answer test.

Question 4

Findings

Answer 4

1. There are context-dependency effects for newly learned material regardless of whether a short-answer test or multiple-choice test is used to assess learning, e.g. silent/silent MC= 14.3 vs noisy/silent MC= 12.7 and silent/silent SA= 6.7 vs noisy/silent SA= 4.6
2. Studying and testing in the same environment leads to enhanced performance
3. Students are likely to perform better in an exam if they study with minimal background noise.