Assume that you wanted to investigate the effect of caffeine on a person's ability to identify the number of times the letter q appeared in a page filled with a random list of letters. To control for the effect of a person's reaction time, you divided people into those that had high and low reaction times and then included this difference in reaction time as another independent variable in the design of your study. By controlling for the possible influence of reaction time in this way you used

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The scenario describes a study where the investigator introduces a potential extraneous variable—reaction time—and explicitly includes it as part of the experimental design to control for its influence. This approach aims to balance or account for differences in reaction time when assessing caffeine's effect on letter-counting accuracy.
Option 2: Random assignment of participants to reaction time groups would involve randomly placing participants into high or low reaction time groups, which does not reflect how reaction time is treated in the described design. The reaction time groups are determined by measured individual differences, not by random assignment.
Option 3: Counterbalancing involves systematically varying the order of conditions for the same participants to control for order effects; it typically applies to within-subjects designs. Simply having participants in each reaction-time group does not constitute counterbalancing.
Option 4: The blind technique refers to keeping participants (and/or researchers) unaware of certain aspects of the study to prevent bias. Merely knowing or not knowing one’s own reaction time does not align with the blind approach described here, and the design focus is on controlling extraneous variables rather than masking conditions.
Option 1: Matching by including the extraneous variable into the design of the study correctly identifies the method used. By treating reaction time as a variable in the design, the researcher controls for its potential impact on the outcome, isolating the effect of caffeine on the ability to identify the letter q occurrences. This reflects a matching/control strategy that accounts for an extraneous variable rather than ignoring it or misapplying other techniques.

FA25: ISE-212 Sec 01 - Hum Factors Exp HFE-ISE 212 Final - Requires Respondus LockDown Browser

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