Mean Reaction Time Lab Report

Procedure This experiment followed the same procedure as experiment 1. The experiment started off by pressing the spacebar. Participants focused on the small fixation dot in the middle of the screen. A couple of seconds after a word or non-word appeared on the screen, and participants pressed the assigned keys in responding whether the stimuli was a word or non-word. Students received feedback of whether they responded too quickly, too slowly, or incorrectly. Data from only trials with correct responses were collected as data. A trial was repeated later on in the experiment if a mistake was made.
Results
Reaction time to a second word or non-word is influenced by the previous word or non-word. The null hypothesis stated that all pairs would have the same mean reaction time, regardless of whether the first string was a word or non-word. The alternative hypothesis stated that the mean reaction time for word-non-word pairs would be slower than non-word-word pairs, which would be equal to the mean reaction time for non-word-non-word pairs.
The mean reaction time for word-non-word pairs was approximately equal to the mean reaction time for the non-word-word stimuli (about 780 ms). The mean reaction time for non-word-non-word pairs was approximately 60 ms slower than the mean reaction times for both word-non-word and non-word-word pairs. This data shows that participants were slower in reacting to non-word-non-word pairs, and faster in reacting to the other two types of pairs.
A one-way ANOVA was conducted to compare the mean reaction times between each stimulus type. The results showed that there was no significant difference between the reaction time and the stimulus type, F (2, 32) =1.338, p = .277. Therefore, we partially accepted the null hypothesis and rejected the alternative