ABSTRACT
Sometimes one condition may be thought of as a ‘baseline’ against which the effect of the other condition is to be judged. A special terminology is then used. We call the baseline condition the control, and the other the experimental condition. Hence, in this case, ‘no traffic noise’ is the control condition, and ‘traffic noise’ is the experimental condition. However, if we were comparing the effects of hot and cold environments, for example, neither treatment could be considered more ‘basic’ than the other, so that the experimental/control distinction would be inappropriate. Instead we would refer simply to the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ conditions.
