Final answer:
Anna Prentice's study focuses on measuring the impact of environmental disruptors on response persistence, manipulating this aspect as the independent variable and recording outcome measures such as accuracy and inter-response time as dependent variables.
Step-by-step explanation:
Anna Prentice's research project examines how an environmental disruptor affects participants' response persistence in a task. In this study, the independent variable that Anna manipulates is the environmental disruptor, such as loud noises and distracting background videos, and the dependent variables that are measured include accuracy and inter-response time of the participants while doing tasks like simple multiplication facts.
By controlling the environmental conditions and measuring the resulting changes in task performance, Anna's research follows the fundamental structure of an experimental study where the aim is to determine the cause-and-effect relationship between the independent and dependent variables through the process of selecting and assigning experimental participants and carefully controlling for potential lurking variables.
Anna's approach to assigning participants to different levels of disruptor exposure ensures that any observed differences in accuracy and inter-response time can be attributed to the effects of the environmental disruptor rather than other uncontrolled factors.
This methodical setup reflects a solid understanding that experiments must have controls in place to provide valid results about the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. Moreover, the precise measurement of the effects on response persistence speaks to the importance of designing experiments that can predict how environmental factors influence responses to information and change behavior in living systems, a concept central to psychological research.