Why isn't the answer alpha for question 41? The person is still 'awake', I thought theta waves would be associated with someone who is asleep, also the symptoms the person is exhibiting seem to be indicative of an alcohol induced state and alcohol usually leads to the display of alpha waves?
Because alpha waves are associated with higher states of consciousness than what the patient is currently at (think alpha = awake but mentally and physically relaxed). Theta waves on the other hand involves reduced consciousness and being awake but not entirely there (think deep meditation, doing something creative like painting) - this better fits with the patient's symptoms. Also, theta waves = low frequency and slowed processing, which could explain the uncoordinated movement and slowed speech.
*Also, just a side point but alcohol is a depressant so it reduces CNS activity and by extension brain activity and also high frequency brain waves like beta and alpha.
Does 'discussing implications' of research mean suggesting possible further hypothesis that can be developed based on the findings of research... or does it mean how the results of the experiment can be implied to a real world context? Also, if it is the latter... does a result have to be valid/reliable in order for an implication to be drawn?
For example in the case of a study investigating the effect of positive reinforcement of learning found that students who were positively reinforced learnt better than students who received no consequence. But due to the fact that findings of the study being confounded by uncontrolled variables, and the use of an unrepresentative sample, neither a conclusion or generalisation could have been inferred. Is it still possible to suggest how the findings relate to a real -world context and say, possible implications from this study could be the use of positive reinforcement by teachers (such as a token economy) in the classroom in order to improve students academic performance.
I did a similar thing in my aos 3 investigation into recall vs recognition, as in I could not draw a conclusion or generalisation, but I did evaluate my results in terms of a real-world context because we were required to. But I was wondering is this correct in terms of the conventions of scientific writing?
AFAIK, 'implications' in the context of scientific research refer to the consequences of your findings to things such as current theories, polices based off research, certain practices and even future research. For instance, if a discovery was made about the reconstruction of memory, an implication of the research could be changes to how witnesses are dealt with in legal proceedings. And another example, you've just discovered something and the implication would be, based off your finds, what would you research next to get a better understanding of the topic.
Can't imagine VCAA would ask a question that required something like that though cause it requires knowledge out of the scope of VCE.
I just want to clarify something about the long term effects of total sleep deprivation. This is a question from the VCAA exam 1 2008 psych exam (and I'm particularly interested in part c). The answer for this question was 'none', but I was wondering, if someone goes for like a week without getting any sleep, would there still be no long term effects? The reason I ask is because if you look the case study of Peter Tripp, he did suffer irreversible consequences as a result of long-term sleep deprivation, whereas Randy Gardener did not experience any long term negative consequences.
There's no real definite answer to that question because there hasn't been enough research into sleep deprivation of that length to have a conclusion that you could generalise (and probably never will be because sleep deprivation studies that long will never research ethics approval today). There are case studies, but they're just case studies that aren't applicable to a wider population. Also, everyone needs a different amount of sleep so everyone's affected by sleep deprivation differently.