Psycology

Method

Subjects:

The two subjects for our experiment were first year male students from commerce program attending University of Toronto at Mississauga. Both subjects were nineteen years of age, and of South Asian decent.

Apparatus:

The experiment was conducted on a Macintosh computer using a program called "Problem Solving". Ten words were from food category, whereas, other ten words were from random categories. Four lists of five 5-letter words were created (appendix A). The maximum number of guesses was set at 99 along with 45 seconds and 20 seconds of guessing time per word. Subjects were shown the elapsed time, time used, and total trial counts. Each word contained at least one vowel, at least one consonant, exact character length, could not end with an "s", four words in food category and four words in random category had repeating letters, and was set to inform and reveal direct hits.

Procedure:

The experiment was a 2*2 factorial design. Subjects conducted the "Problem Solving" program with words from food category, words from random category, 40 seconds and 20 seconds of guessing time, and these were also the four independent variables. The exact character length, at least one vowel, at least one consonant, could not end with and "s", inform and reveal direct hits, and repeating letters were all controlled variables of our experiment. The objective was to guess five letter words; ten were from food category and ten were from random category within the given time frame of 45 seconds and 20 seconds.

The variable conditions were set up as follows:

Condition A Food category 45 seconds

Condition B Random category 45 seconds

Condition C Food category 20 seconds

Condition D Random category 20 seconds

In order to get the subjects used to the program, both subject went through a trial under each condition A-B-C-D. To control the progressive error, trial were counter-balanced as such:

D-C-B-A C-D-A-B B-A-D-C A-D-B-C

While subject 1 was performing the experiment, subject 2 was not present in the room. This was done so that subject 2 does not benefit from having seen the words from trials of subject 1. The purpose was to determine how the time allocation per guess and the type of word affected the total number of guesses needed to solve the word problem. The total number of guesses required under each condition by the subjects to solve the word problem were averaged and plotted on a graph.

RESULTS

The first hypothesis was that the words