Sections to be included
- Title (not included in word count)
- Abstract (not included in word count)
- Introduction
- The method section has been provided as bullet points. You must write this out as an APA-style methods section.
- Results. You must write out the results in APA-style.
- Discussion
- Reference list .You must add two new references to the list provided in this handout (not included in word count).
Research questions
- How does attention affect procrastination in a normal population of students?
- How does working memory affect procrastination in a normal population of students?
For your Research Report, you need to come up with a minimum of TWO directional hypotheses, based on the above research questions.
Method Participants
- 109 students enrolled in PSYC2022/5222participatedin the study
- Results from 62 participants (39females and 23 males) were included in the final analysis.
- Inclusion criteria:
o participants had to have completed all sections of the experiment,
o were not visually impaired,
o had not been previously diagnosed with ADHD, learning impairment and language and reading impairment.
o needed to score above 85% correct on the mathematics operations section of the operations span task.
Materials
Stroop task
- The Stroop task has been widely used to research to measure attention (e.g., MacLeod, 1991)
- The Stroop task was used to assess executive attention in this study.
- In this study there was 60 trials in total:
o 20 trials consisted of words with congruent colour and word names (congruent trials);
o 20 trials consisted of words with incongruent colour and word names (incongruent trials);
o 20 trials consisted of coloured rectangles (neutral).
- Order of trials was presented randomly to participants
- Participants required to respond as quickly as they could by press one of four keys in response to the colour rather than the word name.
- Reactions times were recorded.
- The Stroop interference effect for each participant was calculated by subtracting their mean reaction time on neutral trials from their mean reaction time on incongruent trials.
- Greater Stroop interference indicates worse attention.
Operations span task
- The version of the operations span task used in this experiment was developed by Unsworth, Heitz, Schrock and Engle (2005).
- Participants needed to remember sequences of letters in order, as well as mentally solve maths problems.
- Complete the procedure in the operations span task.
- Each set of mathematics operations and letter sequences varied from 3 to 7 trials per set. At the end of each set, the participants were required to recall the letters in the same order in which they were presented. The participants saw a 4x 3 matrix of letters (F, H, J, K, L, N, P, Q, R, S, T, and Y). Recall consisted of clicking the box next to the appropriate letters in the correct order.
- 75 letters and 75 math problems were presented.
- The operations span (OSPAN) score was calculated by adding up all the correctly remembered letter sequences, while taking into account the number of letters in that sequence. That is, each correctly recalled sequence was multiplied by the number of letters in that sequence, and then a total was obtained for each participant (e.g.., if a participant correctlyrecalled 2 x 3 letter sequences + 2 x 4 letter sequences + 1 x 5 letter sequence, then the score would be 2x3 + 2x4 + 5 = 19).
- Greater operations span scores indicates greater working memory capacity.
PASS procrastination questionnaire (Solomon & Rothblum, 1988)
- The PASS procrastination questionnaire (Solomon & Rothblum, 1994) consists of 44-items divided into two-parts.
- Only results from the first part of the scale were used for this study.
- This measure of procrastination has been previously found to have adequate validity and reliability. For example, Howell et al. (2006) reported an alpha coefficient of .75.
Demographic questionnaire
Describe the demographics questionnaire.
Procedure
The experiments were conducted in class, in either computer rooms containing up to 25 participants, or on the participants' own personal computers at home. Please complete the rest of the procedure.
Results
Please report the results in APA format in your Research Report.
Word count: 2000 words (+/- 10%)