lab report!

ok, i'm having trouble coming up with a decent introduction for my lab report so i shall organize my thoughts here.

what my study did:
1) tested the recall of pictures against words
2) tested the recall of stimuli presented with visual images against without.

hypotheses:
1) pictures should be recalled better than words
2) stimuli presented with visual noise should be recalled worse than stimuli presented without

reasons:
1. pictures provide an additional cue for encoding -> visual and verbal while words only provide verbal cues -> redundancy -> additional cue serves as a back up if the first cue doesn't work (dual encoding)
2. visual noise obscures stimuli -> interferes with encoding process -> worsens retrieval

what others have found:
1. a lot of studies have found that pictures are indeed recalled better than pictures
2. weird results for visual noise. not what i'm looking for!!

inadequacies of current research literature:
1. combining the effects of pictures and visual noise on recall?
2. a lot of research that did on visual noise compared dynamic visual noise and static visual noise, which is not what i want! moreover, the visual noise was presented during the retention interval while our study presented visual noise concurrently with the stimuli.
3. static noise has been found to have no effect on visual STM, but that's when presented during retention interval, what about concurrently? cos retention -> during maintenance while concurrently is during encoding.
4. should there be any difference between picture w/ noise and word w/ noise? would visual noise eliminate the picture superiority effect? must i do another analysis??!!! bloody hell, i have no idea how to run a t-test on SPSS. unless i do it by hand. wth.
5. diff visual noise used. we don't want checkerboard patterns.

results of our study:
1. pictures are indeed recalled better than words (possible mnemonic strategy for students)
2. visual noise has no effect on recall

ARGH I'M SO FRUSTRATED. although part of it may be due to the physiological arousal from caffeine but still, ARGH. hate it when my mind has so much info but can't seem to organize them. wtf wtf wtf.