Reference no: EM132792357

Fatima is designing an experiment to see whether video games can serve as "brain training" to improve attentional capacity, critical thinking, and other cognitive abilities. The experimental group will receive the brain training game. Both the experimental and control groups will receive a pre-training cognitive test and a post-training cognitive test. What could she do to ensure that any post-training effect is due to the training itself rather than expectations about the training?

• Mislead the experimental group about the goals of the study; for example, say the experiment is about the effect of videogames on posture; this way, they will not have any relevant expectations regarding cognitive ability.
• Have the control group do nothing whatsoever, so they have no expectation of improving their own scores; this will give an idea of how much scores can vary from pre- to post-tests even without an expectation effect.
• Use inferential statistics to remove statistical effects due to participant expectations; this will allow estimation of what the results would have been if expectations were not present.
• Convince participants that video games will have the opposite effect (i.e., hurt their cognitive abilities) so any improvement would be evidence of powerful brain training effects counteracting expectation effects.