preview

Losing Your Car At A Parking Lot : Spatial Memory

Decent Essays

Postma, Van Oers, Back and Plukaard (2012) in their paper “Losing your car in a parking lot: Spatial memory in the real world” examines spatial memory including strategy usage in a real-life context. The study took the form of a questionnaire and had duration of approximately 10 minutes; with a sample size of 115 participants and participants matched for both age and gender. Their results suggest gender differences as well as an age effect for spatial memory. One of the main aspects of this study is it’s attempt at ecological validity, attempting to replicate results found within laboratory settings in a real-world setting, though it appears that the cost of ecological validity is decreased regulation over control variables. Postma’s …show more content…

Psychologists seek to be able to generalize their results to a specific population; While an increased sample size may allow for greater confidence when generalizing results, a small sample size does not necessarily suggest that results aren’t generalizable, as long as a power analysis is completed making it possible to calculate a minimum sample size, that will still allow for statistically significant results. As such one of this studies strengths is it large sample size of 115 participants. Participants were then placed into one of six sub-groups; these sub-groups were evenly matched for age and gender. This suggest that any comparisons made using statistical tests such as the Analysis of variance (ANOVA) or Pearson’s chi-square analysis are more likely to be accurate comparisons.
The primary method and source of control variables in this study is a 10 minute questionnaire with 14 open and closed questions, though they fail to control for key aspects such as natural cognitive decline. Though the study does make a point of mentioning their methodological flaws in the form of lack of control over testing situations, such as time of day, distractors, and degree of traffic. One of the strengths of the design is its relatively short time span, preventing fatigue. Sampling was random in so far

Get Access