Statistical research

2. Working memory training

Working memory training is where people repeatedly practise increasingly difficult working

memory tasks to attempt to improve their cognitive performance.

Researchers wanted to see how working memory training affected recognition performance

of a list of words. They recruited 100 participants who were allocated to either the working

memory training group (Condition 1) or the control group (Condition 2).

At the beginning of the study, all participants in Condition 1 and Condition 2 were read 20

target words. The participants then had to try and recognise the 20 target words from a list of

60 words, where 40 were new words. All participants were given two minutes to recognise as

many of the target words as they could.

During the next three weeks:

• Condition 1 (working memory training group) completed a session of working memory

training for 90 minutes, once a week.

• Condition 2 (control group) did no working memory training.

After the three-week period, the participants then performed another memory recognition

task. As before, they had to learn a list of 20 words from a list of 60 words, where 40 were

new words.

(Source: adapted from Matzen et al. (2016))

a) State a fully operationalised directional (one-tailed) alternative hypothesis for the

working memory training study./nStatistical research

b) The number of words correctly recognised (out of 20) by participants was

recorded as a measure of memory performance by the researchers.

State which level of measurement the number of words correctly recognised (out of

20) for each participant would be in the working memory training study.

c) The working memory training study used a laboratory experiment to assess the

memory of the participants.

Explain two strengths of using a laboratory experiment for the working memory

training study.

The total word limit for question 2 is 250 words. This does not include calculations.