Everyday Research Methods

Who benefits from putting the phone away?

Should she have put her phone away in the next room? That depends.
Photo: Suwat Sirivutcharungchit/Shutterstock

Students, if you're not familiar with the study tips on The Learning Scientists website, you should be. This page in particular sums up six evidence-based things you should be doing while you study (spoiler alert: The list does not include highlighting!).

The Learning Scientists' latest blog post sums up the results of an experimental study on where your phone should be while you engage in cognitive tasks. It's titled, "Separation from your cellphone boosts your cognitive capacity." Take a look at the description to get an overview of the research design:

They invited students to participate in an experiment where students were randomly assigned into one of three conditions.

• In the "other room" condition, students were asked to leave their belongings (including their cellphones) in the lobby before coming into the room where the experiment would take place.
• In other two conditions, students were asked to take their belongings with them to the experiment room, and were either told to leave the cellphone out of sight, e.g., in their bags or pockets (bag/pocket condition) or place it face down on the desk within sight (desk condition).

Then, participants worked on two cognitive tasks: One working memory task – called Automated Operation Span task (OSpan) – where people are asked to actively process information while holding other information in mind....For the other task – the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) – participants had to identify the missing piece in a matrix pattern. This test is used to assess fluid intelligence and your performance depends to a large extent on the available attentional capacities to identify the underlying rule of the pattern matrix.

a) Based on the description, what kind of experiment was this: Concurrent measures? Repeated measures? Posttest-only? or pretest/posttest? 

b) What is the independent variable here? There are two dependent variables in this design. What are they? (Note: You might recognize the OSpan task from Chapter 8; it was used in a correlational study about ability to multitask.)

c) What results would you predict from this study? Take a moment to sketch your prediction in graph form. Then click over to the blog post and scroll to the graphs they've made of the results.Do they match your own prediction? 

You can stop working here if you're studying Chapter 10. But if you're studying Chapter 12, keep reading, because there's more!  The second part of the blog post is headed "Cellphone dependence as moderator". Get ready for a factorial design.

The researchers separated people into two new participant variable (PV) groups: Those who reported feeling dependent on their cellphone throughout the day, and those who did not. They then used this PV in combination with the IV of the original design.

d) Given the description, how would you state this design? (Use the form: __ X __ factorial.) 

Here are the results:

• For people who reported a strong dependence, putting the cellphone in the bag or leaving it in another room made a tremendous difference for their cognitive capacity: They performed much better in these two conditions compared to the one where the phone was on the desk.
• For people who reported a weaker dependence, it made no difference where the phone was. Thus, their performance was not affected by the location of the phone.

e) Sketch a bar graph or line graph of the  factorial results described above. You can do it either way, but I'd recommend putting the "cell phone condition" IV on the x-axis. 

f) Do you see an interaction in the results? (You should, because the term "moderator" is a sign of an interaction)

g) Let's return to the headline, "Separation from your cellphone boosts your cognitive capacity." Does the headline seem appropriate for this study? Why or why not? 

Good news: The published article on which this blog post was based is open source! You can view it here. 

Social modeling of persistence to babies

Hang in there, baby, and try again! Photo credit: Creativa Images/Shutterstock

Most people's advice for success in life? Try again after failure. It almost always pays off to try again, work on a new strategy, or think through things differently. But how do people acquire the motivation to keep trying after they've hit a snag? One answer might be through social modeling: watching others around us who have succeeded after retrying. 

Science journalist Ed Yong describes a study in which 1-year-old babies played with an adult under two conditions. One of the adult models performed two simple tasks easily, and the other succeeded at the same tasks only after failing multiple times. A team researchers led by MIT graduate student Julia Leonard conducted the study with 103 infants who visited a children's museum: 

As the babies watched, Leonard tried to retrieve a toy from a container, and detach some keys from a carabiner, narrating her efforts along the way. In front of some babies, she succeeded at each task immediately, performing each three times in the span of 30 seconds. In front of others, she spent the same period struggling, and only retrieved the toy and keys just before the time ran out.

What happened next? 

“Now it’s your turn to play with a toy,” she said to the infants. She then handed them a music box that she had already activated. The box came with a large, conspicuous, and completely useless button. Pressing it did nothing, but it was the act of pressing that mattered. Leonard found that babies who had seen her struggling with her own objects prodded the button more often than those who had seen her succeed effortlessly.

First some questions about the study:

a) Is this study experimental or correlational? (and why?)  What are the independent and dependent variables?

b) If you had to guess, would you say this study was between subjects or within subjects? 

c) How long do you think it might have taken for the researcher who conducted this study to get over 100 babies to participate? 

Now that you've considered question c above, you'll have a greater appreciation for what happened next: The graduate student, Julia Leonard, was asked by her advisor to conduct the whole study all over again! As you read this next quoted passage, look for themes introduced in Chapter 14: 

Her results came in just as psychologists were starting to grapple with their reproducibility crisis—a deep concern that many of the results in published papers might be unreliable due to poorly-designed studies and sloppy practices. To weed out such results, many psychologists have said that their field should put more emphasis on replication—repeating studies to check if their findings hold up. Others believe that more experiments should be preregistered—that is, scientists should specify their research plans ahead of time. [...]

So after Leonard had spent a year studying the value of persistence, her advisor Laura Schulz told her to do the experiment again. “It was a very meta moment,” she says. She recruited another 120 infants, and she preregistered her plans. And to her delight, she got exactly the same results.

Review the information in Chapter 14 and consider these questions:

d) Why might it have been important for Leonard to conduct a replication of her original study? Give three reasons why replication is important.

e) Did Leonard conduct a direct replication, a conceptual replication, or a replication-plus-extension study?

f) Would it have been better for the replication to have been conducted by a different scientist? Why or why not?

g)  Not all replication studies are preregistered, but this one was. What are two of the main benefits of preregistering a study--either a replication study or an original study? 

 

Note: Unfortunately, the original study's publication is behind a paywall.  But if your college subscribes to the journal Science, you can read the paper and even see a movie of four of the infants in the experiment.