PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

that, with the short presentation times of stimuli, participants did encode and
process each object. The order of items was pseudorandomised so that no more
than four items of one emotion were presented sequentially.
Test.
After an interval, of at least two days, participants completed a surprise
recognition test. Participants were presented with three types of stimuli: same,
photographs of objects that were exactly the same as those at study; similar,
objects shared same verbal label but were not identical to those at study; and
new, objects that had not previously been presented. Each object was presented
centrally on the screen and participants were prompted to indicate by key press
whether the item was same, similar or new. Participants were then asked to
indicate their level of confidence in this decision (low or high) by pressing
correspondingly labelled keyboard keys. Items were presented in a randomised
order. A total of 114 items were shown that were the same at study and test,
114 items were shown that were similar to those shown at study (i.e. the other
item from the object pair) and 57 items were shown that were new. One third
of each of the same, similar and new items were negative, neutral or positive.
All participants were presented with exactly the same photographs at test,
whether these items were the same, similar or new for each participant was
counterbalanced by varying the item of the object pair and the stimuli lists
which were shown at study. To enable counterbalancing the items were
presented across four lists with 57 items in each list (19 negative, 19 neutral, 19
positive). A fifth list of items was shown only at test. At the time of debriefing
22 participants confirmed they were not expecting to have their memory tested.
Two participants were not sure. Overall memory performance from those who
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