Experiments: Review

• You are interested in whether the frequency with which university students visit their instructors or TAs during their office hours is related to their GPA. What sort of study might you do?
• You are interested in whether experience performing Western classical music (which normally does not make use polyrhythms) is related to a person's ability to produce polyrhythms. If you were to run an experiment to test this, what would the independent and dependent variables be? Would you use a between-subjects or a within-subjects design? Would there be any confounding variables to worry about?
• You know that the difficulty of perceiving rhythmic patterns varies with the tempo of the patterns. You also know that periodic patterns consisting of repetitions of the same event with variable spacing get more difficult when the beginnings or ends of groups are not evenly spaced. You are interested in whether this second source of difficulty (grouping-timing incompatibility) is affected by the first. For example, does grouping-timing incompatibility exert a greater effect on listeners when the tempo is far above their preferred tempo? In an experiment to investigate these effects, what would the independent and dependent variables be? What sort of experimental design would be appropriate?

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Last updated: 26 October 1995
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~gasser/exp_ex2.html
Comments: gasser@salsa.indiana.edu
Copyright 1995, The Trustees of Indiana University