Subjects

My study will focus on adolescent teens and young adults from ages 13 to 21.Subjects were recruited through simple questionnaires where they were asked their views on marijuana. Subjects were also asked if they’ve ever smoked weed or not. How often do they smoke? And would they consider themselves as “pot heads”. Subjects were also asked what kind of marijuana they preferred to smoke. For this study I want to focus on the type of marijuana and no marijuana. So I will have two experimental groups with two different strengths or types of weed smokers. And as a control group I will have the non-smokers. I only included subjects with no history of smoking and also those who have no family demographics of smokers. Then I used stratified sampling as a mean to place my experimental group into two different levels which is generally those who smoke greens and those who smoke a type of marijuana called sour. Then my control group consisted of a cluster of non-smokers between the ages of 13 and 21. Subjects were excluded if they have past history of smoking anything other than marijuana. Subjects were excluded if the use the substance K-2, and crack cocaine, smoke cigars and cigarettes. This study is only focusing on marijuana. The average age of the subjects was about 17 also subjects were both male and female participants but there was a more prevalence of male participants ranging from a ratio of 4:1. Also there are a total of 150 participants. Subjects were motivated to participate in the research by being offered credit. A school credit was given to those in younger grades and for those ages 16 and above, they were given a small stipend to participate in this study.

Apparatus

I designed my own my own headsbdandz game using information from the NIDA about marijuana. In order to test how marijuana effects on attention increases the frequency of impulsive behaviors, I will have my participants play a game called heads up. In this game students will first be given a sheet of fact will obtain several different fats about marijuana. So some ranging from the different types of marijuana to the many different fun facts such as origin, prevalence etc. So this game will be designed similar to the heads up game where participants will have a head band which will hold a noun or fact on a small index card. The index card will be placed into the designated slot on the head band. The objective of the game is to see which group is able to have better impulse control and less affected attention and memory recall. Each group is given two weeks to memorize the facts and groups with marijuana smokers will have to smoke before they begin the game. Each group will be given about 30 minutes to an hour to play. Subjects also can only ask questions such as “am I a person, place or thing?” and corresponding questions which will pertain to the material read. In each group there will be a score keeper and a observer who will be recording any impulsive behaviors. Some behaviors that we will be looking for are yelling, laughing, and any out of the norm behaviors which can be those who display hyper active behaviors, and lastly any signs of fatigue and excessive hunger or thirst. The stimuli will be presented to the researchers in the game. Subjects won’t be informed of reasons why they must memorize the facts. The stimuli for the experimental groups will be presented to them in the rooms. They’ll have the opportunity to either smoke while playing the game or smoke beforehand. The responses were measured by recording the number of correct answers in total for each group and also by recording behaviors exhibited in the participants.

Procedures

The conditions that were created to compare is how does low strength marijuana, high strength marijuana and no marijuana effects on attention influences the frequency of impulsive behaviors. Subjects in each condition were asked to memorize a list of facts from the NIDA website about marijuana. Then subjects were asked to play a modified version of heads up which will include the information that they were asked to memorize. The subjects were informed of an informational session which would just talk about substance abuse. They were told that this information will focus on marijuana use in America. Then subjects were given an informative fact sheet at the end of the session. They were then told to come back in two weeks, with the information memorized. To collect my data, I had a total of 5 other workers who were paired into three groups of two. Both individuals were given different task, one being to tally correct answers and the other being the frequency of impulse behaviors displayed in amongst each individual in the group every 2 minutes. This is done so that no information will be left out because both individuals will only be focusing on the task at hand.