Participants
Participants were recruited from friends and family of CSUSB students in the Inland Empire area. There were 146 participants aged over 29 (72 women, 74 men, M = 39.65, age range: 30 - 58 years) who were recruited using convenient sampling. It was noted how much TV each participant watched each week. There were no incentives offered for participating in the experiment. In accordance with the American Psychological Association Manual code of conduct and ethical principles, participants were treated with respect (cite)
Materials
A booklet (Appendix A) consisting of four pages. There were two types of booklets; one contains detailed instructions (DI) and the other minimal instructions (MI). The detailed instructions give a …show more content…
The female participant listened to the instructions on page one. The participant did not want to read them herself and she asked for no clarification on what she was to do. She signed and dated the informed consent form. A laptop displayed the slides and the participant responded to each slide with one of the five responses: correct, incorrect, don’t know, TOT resolved and TOT unresolved. The slide show started with slide one and ended at slide thirty-five and the answers were recorded on the response form. After the final response, page four was read to the participant, and she was asked if she had any questions.
Design
The experiment design is a between-subjects experiment. We have one independent variable, the instructions, with two levels, detailed and minimal. Independent sampling t-test was performed on the number of correct TOT responses. The criterion for the experiment was p ≤ .05.
Results
We conducted independent sample t-test on the data. There were nonsignificant differences between the number of TOT responses comparing the detailed instructions and the minimal instructions, t (144) = 1.629, p = .105. See figure …show more content…
With this data, the instructions appear to have not made any difference to the TOT events recorded. The detailed and minimal instructions have nonsignificant results in comparing the TOT responses. The experiment set out to discover the importance of the directions in recognizing a TOT phenomena and it appears not make a difference. The level of instruction did not make a difference in the reported data. It remains unclear what if anything interferes with this process of identification of TOT events, but something to consider is the age of the TV shows and the age of the participants. Some of the shows may have been too old and some of the participants may have been too young to even recognize them enough to give a TOT response. There may have been confusion created in the detailed instructions by referring to the feeling of knowing effect. Widner et al. (??) also completed an experiment on high demand and low demand access which gave results that were nonsignificant between TOT and FOK responses. The extra information given in both cases, i.e. our experiment and Widner et al. (??) showed that no effect of the TOT