Psychology of Thinking

WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT:

Murayama, K. & Kuhbandner, C. (2011). Money enhances memory consolidation – But only for boring material. Cognition, 119, 120-124.

PSYCHOLOGY OF THINKING

CPSY308-FA0; TUESDAYS/THURSDAYS

SUBMITTED TO: INSTRUCTOR: HOLLY BOWEN

SUBMITTED BY: PEILIN MAO 500441537

DATE: TUESDAY, JUNE 5TH, 2012

1. The purpose of Kou Muyarama and Christof Kuhbandner ‘s experiment is to test whether monetary rewards, ie. money, does help to increase memory. Or, in other words, Muyarama and Kuhbandner are trying to prove through their experiment if whether or not monetary rewards do in fact enhances memory abilities.

The author’s hypotheses were that, 1) monetary rewards does, in fact have an impact on memory performance; but it is the delayed, not immediate performance. And 2) monetary rewards only have an impact on uninteresting material. The second hypothesis was due to research in motivational psychology stating monetary incentives could get in the way of actual task engagement, as in if the material was indeed interesting enough to the participant that they’d want to learn anyway; so therefore monetary rewards would not be a factor in memory for meaningful materials.

2. In this experiment conducted by Kou Muyarama and Christof Kuhbandner, the independent variable is monetary reward. Because the researchers manipulated their test subjects of fourty-five undergraduate students with either a monetary reward of 0.25 euro or no monetary reward. The dependent variable is the memory performance, both immediate and delayed.

3. Internal Validity can be defined as simply the direct causes of an experiment, and whether or not it is present in the actual experiment. In particular, is the controlled variables in the experiment averted from unknown third variable that could unknowingly influence the experiment? And how well does the experimenters control the independent variables in the experiment? For K. Muyarama and C. Kuhbandner’s experiment...