Chapter 9.5, Problem 7BSC

Hypothesis Tests of Claims About Variation. In Exercises 7–16, test the given claim. Assume that both samples are independent simple random samples from populations having normal distributions.

7. Color and Cognition Example 1 in this section included results from a study of the effects of color on creativity, and the results below were used to study the effects of color on cognition. Words were displayed on a computer screen with background colors of red and blue. Results from scores on a test of word recall arc given below. Use a 0.05 significance level to test the claim that the samples arc from populations with the same standard deviation. Does the background color appear to have an effect on the variation of word recall scores?

$\begin{array}{l}\text{Red Background: }n=35,\bar{x}=15.89,s=5.90\\ \text{Blue Background: }n=36,\bar{x}=12.31,s=5.48\end{array}$