IGCSE Psychology: Sample Answer for Cognition, 'Evaluate the study by Andrade (doodling).'

*The following answer presents one way of answering the given question out of many possibilities of ways in which a candidate is free to answer.

Sample Question -

Evaluate the study by Andrade (doodling)

Sample Answer - 

The study by Andrade (doodling) used the cognitive approach to study attention. It investigated the impact of doodling on the monitoring and recall of a boring telephone message.

The study employed a laboratory experiment as its research method which enabled it to apply a high degree of control over other factors that could have influenced the monitoring performance of participants. Factors such as anticipation of recall, interference of tasks using the same attention modality, influence of order of presentation on memory, impact on monitoring of any outstanding elements in the message, assignment of participants to the experimental and control groups, etc. were appropriately controlled for. Also, the study used an independent measures design which controlled for any influence of fatigue or exposure on the participant's monitoring and recall performance.

On the downside, however, the use of a laboratory experiment restrained the generalizability of the study. In real-world settings, stimuli that a person needs to attend to are not as well defined as they were in the study. Besides, attention of people is not easily perceivable since it is rarely a matter of remembering a list of stimuli. Alongwith this artificiality in settings and tasks, the sample was also not as representative as desired. It was a convenience sample of adult individuals selected from a common pool, and the gender distribution was highly skewed in favour of females. A larger and more diverse sample would have been more desirable. Also, the impact of individual attention and memory capacity on the final results of the task cannot be ruled out since the participants did not perform any baseline task of determination of their attention or memory.

The independent variable investigated in the study was doodling. It needs special mention here, that doodling as employed in the study was very different from real-world doodling. Though the researchers tried to maintain the characteristic spontaneity of doodling by instructing participants to attempt it casually, and by presenting it very simply; the nature of the task involved shading of readymade shapes, whereas in natural settings, doodling involves the creation of shapes and patterns which are found to be different for different individuals. The laboratory adaptation of this task may, therefore, not be very ecologically valid.

The researchers maintained a high degree of ethics in the study. In particular, participants were given an apology alongwith a debriefing of why deception was used in the study i.e. why they had not been informed about the real purpose of performing the tasks they were given.

Finally, a detailed analysis of data was employed in the study. Separate inferential statistics were used to appropriately compare the monitoring and recall performances of the experimental and control groups. Besides, an overall comparison was also made to provide an overview of the findings. Special care was taken to account for guessing in the data, and missing or faulty data was adequately replaced before calculations were made. This gave the results of the study a high degree of psychometric soundness.

In sum, the Andrade (doodling) study investigated a useful problem, was very carefully and ethically conducted, its variables were meticulously defined, and its findings were technically accurate and psychometrically sound. However, it had limited applicability given it's low ecological validity and restrained generalizability.

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