The absurdity of the use of kph
First and foremost I apologise (yet again) for such a long gap in between blog posts. The return of freedom over the past year has kept me away from screens. They say it takes 66 days to develop a new habit. Running is a habit I developed over lockdown, but the return to the office (and I intend to never work from home again) and frequenting the pub has reduced frequency of this. It is, however, not completely bleak for my physical well-being. Cramming a number of social events in after work has led to me doing a lot more walking around central London. I don’t have an Apple Watch, (other brands of smart watch exist), but my iPhone records my steps and a lot of really interesting data on my walking and running. As would be no surprise, I’ve configured everything in metric units. Thankfully, gone are the days where Apple would dictate to you , based on your location, the units of measurement you use. You have a chose whether to specify distances in miles or kilometres....
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Introduction
Memory has played a major role in psychological studies, psychologists are constantly looking into how it works, and things that could affect and change it. Many things can affect memory, such as age, distractions, and time.
Sometimes people’s memory can be influenced by other people, which was shown by Loftus and Palmer in 1974. They took a group of 45 participants, and showed them a video of a car accident. One group of 9 were then asked, “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” The other 4 groups of 9 were asked the same question, but with the words “smashed”. “Collided”, “bumped”, and “contacted” were used. They found that when the word “smashed” was used, the participants estimated the cars were travelling around 10mph faster than when the word “collided” was used. From this Lofus and Palmer concluded that leading questions, and influence can have an effect on memory.
In 1966 a study was done by Glanzer and Cunitz in order to determine the capacity of short term memory, they took two groups of participants and presented them both with the same list of words. Group A were asked to recall the words immediately, and B recalled after 30 seconds, and did a distracter task. Glanzer and Cunitz found that words at the start of the list were called more accurately as they had been transferred to long-term memory; this is called the primary effect.