pozzulo et al. (line-ups)

cognitive approach

What are the three aims of the study?

1. to explore the effect of social versus cognitive factors on children’s performance as eye witness compared to adults

2. to test whether the children will be as good as adults at identifying cartoon faces and worse than adults at identifying human faces in a target-present line-up

3. to test whether children will be worse than adults at rejecting cartoon and human faces in a target-present line-up

What approach does the study follow?

individual differences in cognitive processes such as attention, language, thinking, and memory can help to explain our differing behaviors and emotions

link: they are studying the difference between adults and child memories and how they share and process information to memorize specific details

What are the features of the sample?

used opportunity sampling

children:

• aged 4-7 years old

• 59 total (21F 38M)

• selected from three private schools in eastern Ontario, Canada

adults:

• aged 17-30

• 53 total (36F 17M)

• selected from the introductory psychology participant pool of an eastern Ontario university

What was the research method?

lab experiment: done in an artificial environment

What are the two experimental designs?

repeated measures: both the children and adults were tested on cartoon and human line-ups as well as target-present and target-absent line-ups

independent measures: the age of the participants does not change

What were the independent variables and how were they operationalized?

nature of target faces: familiar cartoon faces or unfamiliar human faces

age: young children or adults

type of line-up: target-present or target-absent line-up

What were the dependent variables?

response rate for identification: number of false positives and number of false negatives

What are some potential extraneous variables?

• IQ may influence memory

• children are very young making it difficult to understand the task

• participants may have vision impairments

• 2D characters have less complexity

• demand characteristics

What were some controls used?

• children were monitored for fatigue and stress

• the videos only the face and no clothing to ensure they are looking at the face and not the clothes

• experimenters wore casual clothing (blouse and dress pants) to ensure the children were comfortable

• the 4 videos and order of line-ups was randomized for every participant

• all videos were in color and muted

What were the details about the videos and line-ups?

cartoon targets:

• dora the explorer- talking to the audience

• go Diego go- putting on a pair of gloves for safety

cartoon foils:

• cartoon characters from the internet that looked similar to the targets

human targets:

• one female caucasian brushing her hair

• one male caucasian putting on a coat and exiting his home

human foils:

• picked a random pool of people that looked similar to the targets