Fix It Brooke Is a New Graduate Student. Her Advisor, Dr. Martinez

question 47

Essay

Fix It
Brooke is a new graduate student. Her advisor, Dr. Martinez, has been studying the impact of experience on cognitive function for years. Dr. Martinez assigns Brooke several journal articles to read. She finds one in particular that piques her interest. The paper describes that rats that voluntarily exercise for 30 days perform better on the Morris Water Maze, a task indicative of declarative memory. She wonders whether this is true in humans, and whether the positive effect of exercise occurs sooner than 30 days following exercise. To that end, Brooke places an ad in the student newspaper to recruit volunteers. Brooke randomly selects 80 participants from the 128 people who responded to the ad. Participants are first assigned to an exercise condition or sedentary condition. Each condition is further divided so that some people participate for 2 weeks, some for 4 weeks, and others for 6 weeks. Participants in the exercise condition are asked to exercise at least twice a week. Participants are asked to keep a diary of their activity and also note their heart rate at five-minute intervals throughout their workout session. Sedentary participants are asked to not change their daily habits. After participating, each person returns to the lab to complete the TOMAL-2, a test to assess declarative memory (higher scores indicate better memory). The results revealed that participants who exercised for 4 weeks and those who exercised for 6 weeks performed much better on the TOMAL-2 than those who did not exercise at all. Interestingly, those who exercised for only 2 weeks performed similarly to those who did not exercise at all. These results suggest that a minimum of 4 weeks of exercise is needed to improve cognitive performance in adults.
How would you describe this research design? What are its advantages? Discuss the operational definition of exercise and describe how and why you might change it.

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Definitions:

Recession

An economic downturn characterized by a decrease in GDP, employment, and trade activities, typically lasting for a period.

Expenditures

Expenditures refer to the act of spending money or incurring expenses, particularly by governments, businesses, or individuals.

Automatic Stabilizers

Strategies and initiatives aimed at stabilizing a country's economic fluctuations without further action from the government.

Economic Conditions

The state of an economy at a given time, including factors like inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth.