Assessment Task 2 Information for you
Method (this is purely for your information and should not be copied into your report).
Participants
Ninety students from a 2nd year Australian Centre of Applied Psychology undergraduate psychology
course participated in the experiment as part of their course curriculum (31 males and 59 females;
mean age = 23.72 years, SD = 5.97). All participants had normal or corrected—to—normal vision
and hearing. Participants were randomly assigned to either the Control (Group 1; N=45) or Auditory
Distraction (Group 2; N=45) groups.
Materials
The following assessments were used in the study:
• Crime drama video clip: participants were presented with a short 8 minute section of a video
depicting a crime drama.
• Word finder filler task: a 30 item task that requires participants to view an incomplete sentence
e.g. “I am wearing __ shoes” and to write down a word to complete the sentence. The
purpose of the WFFT in this study was to create a delay between watching the video and
answering cued recall questions based on the content of the video. The task has a duration of
approximately 3 minutes.
• The cued recall task: a 30 item set of questions presented online using the Moodle interface that
prompts cued recall of the crime drama video clip. Questions are randomly presented to
participants: 15 referred to visually obtained information and 15 related to information obtained
acoustically. A total score of 15 can be achieved for each of the modalities. Scores were
converted into percentages. Maximum score =100%.
Procedure
• Participants were put into one of two groups (Group 1 and Group 2). Participants were asked to
watch a short video clip (duration of approximately 8 minutes) taken from a modern crime
drama).
• After watching and listening to the video clip, each group completed a word finder filler task
(WFFT). On completion of the WFFT, participants answered questions online that related to the
crime drama video clip that could be answered from information that has been heard or viewed.
• Group 1 participants did not experience any distraction during the recall task. In Group 2,
participants were instructed to play an audiobook, which served as an auditory distractor, while
completing the recall task. The audiobook was “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy, and was
chosen because it was not semantically related to the crime drama vide