Cognitive Psychology - Essay Example

The authors’ main research questions were: If updating is the automatic result of locomotion, would people have ease or difficulty with ignoring their locomotion when walking without vision? If updating was an optional process that only occurred as the result of deliberate and effortful cognitive processing, would people find the task easy? Is the performance of people walking without vision better in the updating condition when they are told to ignore their locomotion? Is there was any difference in performance when people walked blindly to near targets compared to far targets?

Are people able to overcome the information specifying their real positions in space and temporarily by adopting a different perspective, when they are given enough time to carry out the necessary cognitive operations? First hypothesis of the research was that: Performance of people while updating their spatial relationships is better as compared to when they are told to ignore their locomotion. The third hypothesis was that: If subjects can retrospectively overcome the earlier automatic spatial updating, then their performances in the ignoring condition should improve relative to the updating condition.

These hypotheses were justified on the basis of background research and theory, because the authors have given an extensive review of literature citing other researchers’ works, and explaining them in order to support the need to conduct this specific research. They have cited literature which discusses the automatic updating of non-visual spatial relationships. The population of interest was young people. The sample for the first experiment included ten student volunteers from the Strathclyde University Psychology Department; and, the sample for the second experiment included ten other student volunteers from the same department and university.

The sample was not very