Told-Alcohol Effects On Memory

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Assefi and Garry (2003) hoped to better understand alcohol consumption’s effects on memory. The main question they hope to answer is “whether told-alcohol subjects would be more affected by misleading post event information than told-tonic subjects” (Assefi & Garry, 2003, p.2). The investigators hypothesized that alcohol placebos affect behaviors in social influences but not nonsocial influences. This is an experimental study which uses a placebo and an eyewitness testimony design to reveal the social and nonsocial influences of memory. This experiment consisted of 148 undergraduates. Each subject received a control and post event information (PEI). All subjects received an envelope telling them if they had tonic or vodka, yet all subjects received a plain tonic despite what the envelope led them to believe. After watching an action movie, the subjects viewed slides of a shoplifter. Two versions of the crime scene were shown, each with different item characteristics. Next, the subjects worked on filler tasks until it was time to read a misleading narrative containing false and true information about the items shown in the …show more content…

Thus, the ones that received the vodka envelope would be more likely to believe the false items were present in the original scene than the ones who received plain tonic. They also believed that subjects in both groups would have similar responses to the control items. Thus, no matter what they believed they would both remember the accurate items listed that were not tampered with. Because this is a quantitative study, the independent variable is whether the subject had the tonic or vodka envelope. The dependent variable is the subject’s memory performance shown by the test. These two variables are linked because whether they have one envelope or the other will show which group seems to perform

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