A researcher conducted an experiment to examine the effects of distracting noise on people's ability to solve anagrams (scrambled letters that can be unscrambled to make words). Participants worked on anagrams for 10 minutes while listening to the sound of jackhammers and dissonant music that was played at one of four volume levels (quiet, moderate, loud, or very loud).
After analyzing the number of anagrams that participants solved in the four conditions, the researcher concluded that loud noise did, in fact, impede participants' ability to solve anagrams.
In fact, the noise conditions accounted for 23% of the total variance in the number of anagrams that participants solved.
a. Is this a small, medium, or large effect?
b. What proportion of the total variance was error variance?
c. List at least 10 things that might have contributed to the error variance in this study.