The Chocolate Affair. By Adam Duran. . Psy 325 Statistics

The Chocolate Affair By: Adam Duran PSY 325 Statistics for the Behavioral Social Sciences Instructor: Jeral Kirwan Introduction The study of human memory stretches back at least 2,000 years to Aristotle’s early attempts to understand memory in his treatise â€Å"On the Soul†. (Masten, 2010) In this, he compared the human mind to a blank slate and theorized that all humans are born free of any knowledge and are merely the sum of their experiences. (Masten, 2010) Unfortunately, as life and our anatomy would have it these experiences tend to fade away as we get older. As these memories are the pillars of life’s lessons learned, feelings of happiness, joy and love it is no doubt that we want to hold on to†¦show more content†¦There will be two groups. Group 1 will consist of 25 males and 25 females. They will be instructed to not eat chocolate before the memory test. Group 2 will consist of the other 25 males and 25 females who will be instructed to eat chocolate two hours before taking the memory test. Every participant will be asked to read a chapter eight of Stati cs for Behavioral and Social Science 2nd edition by David Tanner a two days before to taking the memory test. Data Analysis: In order to analyze the data, the significance level (p-value) was set to .05. This means that there is a 5% chance of finding a difference between the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis. Assuming that the null hypothesis is true, a p-value is the probability of the data falling outside of the normal bell curve of the sample data. A p-value less than or equal to the set significance level is considered statistically significant. In addition, to setting the significance level it is important to determine the number of degrees of freedom. This number shows how often the data can be free to vary. To calculate this, add up the number of samples from each group and then subtract two. In this case the degree for freedom is 50+50 - 2 =98 With a set significant level and degrees of freedom, the t-value can then be determined by using the t-table. Results: After the t-test was conducted to compare men and women’s performance on a memory test after eating chocolate, the results