Reports on projects which have involved U3A members as volunteer subjects

Obviously if U3A members have given their time as collaborators in research projects, or as subjects in experiments, they will wish to know what has eventually emerged from the research in which they took part. If the project is incomplete, some sort of interim report would be very welcome. The links below lead to short reports on some of these projects:

Note: All reports are the responsibility of the authors; its contents and any opinions expressed are not formally endorsed by the University of the Third Age in Cambridge.
Institute of Criminology Eyewitness Memory Study
Hearing study

Institute of Criminology Eyewitness Memory Study
The Institute of Criminology’s research study on the effect of time of day on people’s eyewitness memory has now concluded. Many of the participants were members of the U3A, so we would like to say thank you and report back on our results.
In total 48 men and women aged 60 or older and 48 men and women aged 30 or younger took part in this research. They were first tested to see if they were morning or evening types, i.e. if they were more alert in the morning or the evening. Then they watched a brief film about a staged crime, told us what they remembered and answered questions about it. This session was scheduled either in the morning or in the evening. This meant that we had four groups: morning people tested in the morning, evening people tested in the evening (the optimally tested group), and morning people tested in the evening, and evening people tested in the morning (the non-optimally tested group).
The results were twofold: We found that when asked to give their own account of what happened in the film without being prompted by questions, people tested at their optimal time were only a tiny bit better than those tested non-optimally.
However, when we asked questions, people in the optimal testing group remembered 20 more correct details than the non-optimally tested group, and this translate into 19% more correct details of the total remembered. And crucially, while remembering more, they did not make also more mistakes. This means that taking time of day into account when interviewing witnesses could help to improve witness statements.
We also found some age differences between young and old participants but they were quite surprising. Only when asked questions the younger group remembered more correct details than the older group. When asked to tell everything they could remember without prompts, the older group remembered more! We believe the reason for this was that the older group took the test very seriously and was very motivated to perform well, while the students seemed to be perhaps more motivated by the money we paid for participation than by wanting to do well in the test.
Nevertheless, this is one of the rare findings where an older group performs better in a memory tests than a younger group. In witness situations it is often the initial report provided by the witness that is important, which would be equivalent to the unprompted report in our study. Thus our results show that, when motivated to do well, older witnesses can report as much as young ones, sometimes even more.
For us at the Institute of Criminology, this has been a very valuable study which has contributed much to our understanding of eyewitness memory. I would like to thank all those who have taken part!
Dr. Katrin Mueller-Johnson, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, < kum20@cam.ac.uk >

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Hearing study
Some of you will remember coming to the Linguistics Department at Cambridge University last year to participate in a hearing study. In the course of the testing session, I first measured your ability to hear tones of different frequencies, and then asked you to listen to sentences and write down what you heard. With the help of those sentences I measured how well you could understand target words that contained an “r” depending on whether or not the first half of the sentence contained acoustic cues congruent with an upcoming “r”. The results are now in and I thought you might like a quick summary of the results. I did indeed find that the subtle cues in the first half of the sentence made it easier for listeners to later perceive the “r”-word. Moreover, these same cues made it less likely for listeners to correctly hear “non-r” target words when they were present but not followed by a word with the letter “r”. This result pattern was particularly true for listeners with very good hearing in high frequencies. As high-frequency hearing worsened, listeners were less likely to hear those subtle “r” cues, and having them in the beginning of the sentence did neither help nor hinder word perception. Much to our fascination, listeners with hearing loss in the high frequencies started to use other information to aid perception, particularly information on word frequency. Hence, when in doubt of the correct word, they would choose that word, which is most common to the English language. These results are interesting because they show not only that listeners change their listening strategies to accommodate changes in hearing, but also how listening strategies can be adjusted. Moreover, we would like to argue that having to rely on knowledge (of word frequency for instance) rather than the acoustic information inherent in the signal (signified by our subtle manipulation at the beginning of each sentence) is more effortful and tiring over the course of a long conversation, and that this might be one of the reasons why listening in noise becomes more exhausting as we age. Many thanks to everyone who agreed to participate in the study!

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