Schmidt (1994) conducted a series of experiments examining the effects of humor on memory. In one study, participants were shown a list of sentences, of which half were humurous, and half were nonhumurous. A humurous example is, " If at first you dont succeed, you are probaby not related to the boss. " Other participants would see a nonhumorous version of this sentence, such as " People who are related to the boss often succeed the very first time".
Schmidt then measured the number of each type of sentence recalled by each participant. The following scores are similar to the results obtained in the study:
Humurous sentences: 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 6 6 6 7
Non humuous sentences: 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 5 5 6
A) Identify the independent variable and the dependent variable for this experiment.
B) Sketch a polygon showing the frequency distribution for the humurous sentences. In the same graph, sketch a polygon for the nonhumurous sentences. Does it appear that humour has an influence on memory?