Results and Conclusions

After conducting my experiment, I analyzed my data, drew conclusions, and wrote a report. Below is my finished research paper. Thanks for reading! 

Possible Sources of Error

Since I've just completed the phase of my research involving data collection, I'm ready to move onto data analysis and working out any conclusions I may find evidence for. However, before posting all of the graphs, raw data, and conclusions I'm starting to form, I'd like to bring up some possible sources of error.

Sample Size: 

About ten students showed up in each group. Simply put, ten students in each sample is on the small end. Ideally, I would have had fifty or so in each group, and the more the better. Having groups as small as mine were can still yield accurate results, but the chance of error is much higher than it would be for larger groups. 

Musical Preference: 

The musical preference of subjects in psychological experiments has been known to influence the effect of music on cognition. For this reason, I did include a question in the survey given to subjects on whether they enjoyed the music or found it distracting, but I'm not sure if I will be able to separate groups into further categorizations based on this question because of the already small sample size. 

Moving Rooms: 

Unfortunately, for one of my trials, I had to use a different room than I used for the other two. Although the rooms' builds were the same, one was the Mandarin room while the other was for French. While this may or may not have had any impact on the participants, it is still worth noting. Perhaps the students who regularly had a class in one classroom unconsciously felt slightly more comfortable in it than those who didn't. 

My Interactions with Subjects: 

While I'd like to think I said all of the same things and spent about the same amount of time each day explaining the instructions to each group, I must consider the possibility that my interactions with the subjects influenced their moods or behavior. For example, I might have seemed more excited and encouraging on the day when I expected subjects to do best. 

Background Noise: 

During one of the silent periods, a teacher walked into the adjacent room, making some noise for about a minute. It wasn't loud, but it might have been a bit distracting to students who were completely focused on their task beforehand. 

The Group Dynamic:

Because I tested subjects in groups rather than as individuals, I should consider what effects this might have had. For example, students might have already felt motivated and competitive about finding as many words as possible simply because they were in groups. This is one of my main concerns about my procedure. 

So, as you can see, there are many, many different possible sources of error. When making my conclusions, the best thing I can do about this now is to give each some thought and discussion. The results of my study could be an accurate reflection of the independent variables I changed for each group, but if not, these sources of error are some possible reasons why. 

Conducting My Experiment

My own experimental trials will involve the help of thirty-three helpful ninth-grade volunteers from BASIS Flagstaff! Over the span of three days, I will be conducting my study and collecting data. I've randomly split the volunteers into three groups of eleven with roughly even amounts of males and females in each group. Each group will come in during their lunch for half an hour to participate in the research. Here's what I'll be doing.

The Three Groups:

Group 1 - Priming with Music

This group will only be primed with music. I've chosen Vivaldi's Spring to be used for the purposes of this experiment. Similarly to John Bargh's landmark study (The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals) the participants will be asked to solve a word search with thirteen "neutral," non-priming words in it. (For example, "turtle," or "building.") They will complete this task while listening to Vivaldi. Next, they will be given ten minutes to find as many words possible in three following word searches with the themes "colors," "foods," and "animals." Lastly, they will be given a short survey. The last two tasks are what I will be analyzing: specifically the number of words found on the three word searches and their answers to the survey questions. 

Group 2 - Priming with Words

This group will only be primed with words. The subjects will complete a word search with thirteen words on it, several of which are aimed at priming for motivation and high-performance. Some of these words include "strive," "succeed," and "achieve." It was necessary to give Group 1 a similar word search with neutral words in order to keep as much of the experimental procedure between groups as constant as possible. Next, they will complete the same two tasks completed by Group 1 following the initial word search. 

Group 3 - Priming with Music and Words

This group will be primed with both words and music. Participants will complete the same word search done by Group 2, except in this group, subjects will listen to Vivaldi while doing it. As in Group 1 and Group 2, they will proceed to work on the three themed word searches and the survey. 

After collecting all of my data, I will have to analyze it and look for differences in results. If you are interested in taking a look at the word searches and survey I'm using, they are attached below.

Materials: Three Word Searches, Neutral WS and Survey, Prime WS and Survey

Important Testing Considerations

When running tests of any kind, scientists must try to limit the variation between different sample groups to the independent variable(s) they are hoping to test. In psychology, this is especially difficult because even the slightest differences in environment can affect results. Furthermore, inevitable differences in preferences, interests, and general mental processes between individuals bring yet another challenge.

So, what do psychologists do to ensure their tests are as controlled as possible? There are some things nearly all experiments take into consideration.

Sex:

Scientists often like to split their sample groups randomly, but with roughly equal proportions of the male to female sexes in each group. If they do not, they may consider this in their statistical calculations when analyzing their data. For the most part, gender does not have an influence on results. However, it is worthwhile to consider that the male and female brains are different in several ways. For example, males tend to be better at spatial processing and focusing on a single task while females tend to be better at communication, empathy, and multitasking. Read more here.

Age:

Age is also an important factor in psychology simply due to the way our brains change as we grow older. Scientists have theorized that cognitive decline may begin as early as our 20s or 30s! Read more here. When their experiments do not have to do with differences in age groups, psychologists try to test a single age group. For example, many studies use college students as test subjects. 

Sample Size:

Researchers must balance having a sample size large enough to obtain accurate results from with one that is manageable considering time and resource restraints. Published studies usually use anywhere from about thirty to several hundred subjects per group. 

Other Things to Control:

The simple answer? Everything you can. 

If researchers are interacting with subjects, what they say to each sample group should ideally be scripted. Psychologists should take into consideration the color of the rooms they use, whether they test subjects individually or in groups, any background noise, the time of day, even the smell of a room or their own moods. In fact, many researchers use volunteers who aren't aware of what their research is to conduct the testing and input the data. 

In my research, I will try to keep the sample size, the proportion of males and females, the room, the scripting, the age of participants, and the time of day constant. 

Cognitive Tests And Measuring The Abstract

This post will discuss methods that can be used to test subjects in priming and related psychological experiments.

Some of the difficulties that arise in many cognitive psychological studies can be attributed to the large amount of variables that may influence results. For example, when measuring the emotional or motivational state of a subject, researchers must carefully target their measure of this so as not to include irrelevant material that may influence their results. Secondly, cognitive psychology researchers must consider the intrinsic subjectivity of their field. If two similar labs were conducting similar research on the perception of an emotion such as happiness, their results could be completely different depending on their method of measurement. To reduce the potential of error due to the above factors, researchers have historically used well-targeted measures that can be easily replicated. In some branches of psychology, there are "standard" tests (that give certain scores) used for studies of a certain nature. You can find some of these listed here. Here are a couple interactive tests if you're in the mood: test your memory and reaction time here. The two links above should give you an idea of what psychological testing can look like.

A standard spatial reasoning test: which cube unfolds into the shape above?

Historically, priming has involved tests of reaction time, spatial reasoning, emotional state, memory, behavior, persistence, intellectual arousal, and the list could go on. For instance, when the Mozart effect was first officially "discovered," Rauscher et al. 1993 measured spatial reasoning. With the advancement of technology, brain scans like EEGs (electroencephalograms) measuring neural activity are becoming increasingly common. An interesting study in 2007 led by Mathias Pessiglione used brain scans to give empirical evidence for the influence of money on motivation (PDF found here).

An example EEG from Wikipedia

Anyways, what I think I'll be measuring is emotional state (which I should be able to connect to intellectual arousal), persistence on a difficult task, perhaps the results of that task, and attention levels during a short educational video. I'm still in the process of reading through studies testing similar things for ideas, but I'm hoping to find an appropriate test for emotion/intellectual arousal that's been used several times before. 

I'm looking to get my tests completed in the next few weeks, so check back for updates! Thanks!

How To Prime 101

Now that we know that priming works from the massive amounts of past research done on it, the next step is finding a method to conduct tests with. To do that, a reliable, easily-accessible way to prime people must be chosen.

 Here are some things to consider:

• Should subjects be unconsciously or consciously primed? 
• What music should be used? 
• How long should subjects listen to it?
• What words should be used?
• How will subjects be exposed to the words?
• Should subjects be exposed to primes as a group or individually?

And here are my thoughts. 

Unconscious vs. Conscious Primes

This really only applies to priming visually with words. While many psychological studies involving words as primes have been conducted with "subliminal" visual stimuli (below the threshold of conscious perception), all the music studies I've read have used music that subjects were consciously aware of. At this point, you might be wondering about how subliminal visual stimuli work, or even what they are in the first place. Well, in the 1900s, researchers found that messages (most commonly consisting of words) can be flashed on a screen so fast that onlookers don't consciously perceive them, but not so fast that their brains don't process them. This unconscious processing of subliminal stimuli has been the basis for many, many priming studies in which these stimuli have had an effect on subjects.

Because of this, one of my first concerns for my own research was whether I would have to prime subjects unconsciously. However, upon doing a bit of digging, I found study that solved all of my problems in this area. In 1992, John Bargh published this study: Does Subliminality Matter to Social Psychology? Awareness of the Stimulus versus Awareness of its Influence.  According to Bargh, it doesn't matter if a prime is unconsciously or consciously introduced. As long as subjects don't know the intended effect of a prime, the prime should work. 

That made my job easier, conscious primes are much easier to implement. 

What Music Should be Used?

At first, scientists thought that the Mozart effect was limited to Mozart music. Unsurprisingly, this proved to be a false assumption, and researchers have generally agreed that any sort of happy, upbeat music similar to Mozart music had a similar effect to Mozart. However, in spirit of the first study (Rauscher et al. 1993), I'm considering this: 

Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major

Or another widely-used (and very famous!) piece in psychological studies involving music:

Vivaldi's Spring from The Four Seasons

Both pieces are common in studies similar to what I'll be doing. 

How Long Should Subjects Listen? 

This one's easier: nearly all studies testing the Mozart effect have exposed subjects to ten minutes of music. 

What Words Should be Used? 

Given my limited experience with psychology, the words I'm thinking of using will come from past studies of a similar nature. One thing to keep in mind is that the words and the music should prime for similar target effects. If you read my background page, you'll remember that the Mozart effect arises primarily because of intellectual arousal and positive emotion associated with music. Hence, the words I use should prime for similar intellectual arousal and positive emotion. Past studies have used words such as "interested,"  "desire," "willing," "succeed," "strive," "achieve," and "master."

How Will Subjects Be Exposed to the Words? 

Ideally, subjects should be exposed to the words for around ten minutes (similarly to the music) and interact in some way with them for most of that time. Historically, a relatively common way to do this has been through puzzles. For example, word matching tasks, crosswords, or word-searches are all options. For these tasks, however, there is a level of mental exertion required, which could undesirably affect results. Perhaps a reading passage with the prime words interspersed might be slightly preferable. Regardless of which method I use, past studies have shown that priming effects are still significant with each. 

Should Subjects be Exposed to Primes as Groups or as Individuals?

As of now, I'm thinking I'll do both and compare results. Several studies have suggested that the Mozart effect is weaker when groups of people listen to music and then are tested. The research on this is still sparse, so I'm still not sure what to expect. Perhaps the group environment is simply distracting. Or maybe people are motivated to do better when others are around. I'm hoping to find out.

Keeping in mind everything above, my next step is to decide on testing methods to obtain data and results, which I'll post for later this week. 

Mind Control? Not Quite, It's Just Psychology.

Ever since beginning to look into psychology, I've thought of it as something that can be useful to anyone, anytime, anywhere. The more you know about how the human mind works, the more you know about yourself and everyone around you. Because of this, I've chosen to study psychology in my senior research project. Perhaps at the end of my study, I'll have made some interesting psychological discoveries that can be useful to everyone's daily life.

Let's jump right in. Here are a couple situations that you'll probably find pretty familiar.

1. Remember that class where your eyelids seemed to have weights attached to them and you wondered why the hands on the clock behind you were moving so slowly? You might have resisted the temptation to pass out on your desk only to find your head is bobbing up and down every so often as you drifted in and out of sleep. You reassured yourself that you'd been learning or perhaps listening even though your eyes were closed, but let's be honest, you hadn't been.

2. Now think back to that class where you were feeling pretty good about learning. You were excited to jot down every word on the powerpoint in front of you and you were determined to take the most aesthetic set of notes you'd ever taken. Learning is so fun, you told yourself, and you probably aced the quiz on whatever it is you learned that day. 

We all want to be able to have more of the second situation and less of the first, but how can we make this change? What's the difference between the two situations? Well, maybe you forgot your morning coffee in the first situation, or maybe you just forgot to go to bed on time, but what about those days where you have one class where you're alert and as ready to learn as ever, and the next class is the complete opposite? I believe that there may be psychological solutions to this dilemma. 

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying I can cure fatigue or lack of interest with a bit of psychology I've researched in high school. I'm simply hoping to increase the likelihood of situation two and decrease the likelihood of situation one in the classroom. My research will attempt to do this through a psychological phenomenon called priming. Here's a basic definition of priming:

"Priming is what we call it when exposure to some thing influences the behavior of an individual later on, without that individual being aware that the first thing is guiding their behavior to a certain extent." 

Click here to see where I got that definition and for more detail with some cool examples.

So priming is a pretty cool concept, and a fellow student remarked that it was kind of like simple (albeit unreliable) mind control.

If you think about it, priming is used everywhere in our daily lives. Have you ever spent more than usual on wine at a fancy restaurant? Perhaps the restaurant was playing classical music, subconsciously pushing you towards a higher bill at the end of the meal. Classical music has been shown to be an effective 'prime' that gives people a tendency to spend more on wine. Here's the study. There are even several studies on how music can influence the way wine tastes!

What else can priming do? Studies have gone as far as to give evidence that priming with money can make people act more selfishly or that priming with words related to the elderly can even make people walk more slowly! These studies are questioned today since they haven't yet been replicated, but one priming experiment with racial stereotypes and academic performance has been widely accepted as true. Basically, adding a question about race before a standardized test significantly worsened African-American students' performance on that test compared to white students of similar previous testing scores. (Feel free to read more on the study here.)

All of this research on priming gave me reason to ask myself the following question: what if priming could be used to change students' attitudes in class? Maybe listening to some upbeat classical music in the background before class started could unconsciously prime for alertness. Maybe it could give students a feeling of sophistication (which is most likely what it did for wine buyers in the aforementioned experiment) that inspires them to want to become as educated as possible and have a 'situation two' type of class. Maybe visual priming with words associated with the same concepts of alertness and sophistication or others such as drive and success could give students subconscious incentive to pay more attention in class.

To conduct this research, I will have the pleasure of working with NAU MS Candidate Mackenzie Onofry and our generous math and statistics teacher here at BASIS, Chris Lamb.

I can't guarantee that my ideas will work, but if you're interested in the possibility, this blog is for you.

P.S. For a bunch of background info that will help you understand everything in this blog, follow the link on the sidebar to Everything You Need To Know. Read this!