The effects of pornography on memory recall

[u/akponcelet]

Hello! I am an undergrad psych student at Moravian College and recently ran an experiment to test porn and memory recall. My hypothesis was that viewing pornography had a negative effect on memory recall, and that it would result in weaker recall. In short, the findings weren't significant. With that being said I plan to revamp and run my experiment again next semester.

What I used was a laptop computer, a power point slide, a pornographic video, a comedy sketch video for the control group, and a questionnaire at the end. At the start of the experiment I read people a list of 15 words (repair, bottom, cook, zero, harbor, day, quiet, false, wheel, lesson, morning, open, plant, grass, kind), and showed them a slide of 15 black and white plain line drawings (hand, boat, ring with jewel, crescent moon, cat, coffee/tea mug, lamp, lightbulb, house, shoe, rose with stem, bottle, triangle, chair, car). After this I would either show them a 3min 37sec porno compilation video or comedy sketch video. Then as soon as the video ended I would give them a piece of paper to list the words and images they recalled from before the video. What I found was the mean recalled words for the porn group were 1.8, images were 8.2. For the control group the recalled words were 2.5, and images were 8.6. So, there was a slight increase in recall between the groups but nothing significant.

I'm posting here because I would love for comments and perhaps even some new ideas on revamping the experiment. I was thinking of getting a new comedy video, a new porn video, a new word list, and maybe a new image list.