How would you design a study on how memory changes with increasing age in human subjects?

Question

I have to design this study as if I were a a research Psychologist and that I have all the resources such as money, lobor, equipment,ect to carry out this research. I need to know what, exactly would the purpose measure,and how I would measure it. Design the over all design.

Answer 1

create list of words being careful to be gender neutral and not use anything likely to be firmly grounded in peoples minds eg. the planets. Use standarised instructions for the participants to read to ensure they all have the same explanation given to them. Do the experiment in the same place if possible to avoid situational variables. Let the participant read the list or you read it out at the same speed for everyone (helps avoid reading ability issues). Then if your testing short term memory use a distractor task for say two mins (ask them q's or chat). You than ask the participant to repeat as many words they can in 2 mins. Try and get as many ages as you can but check your college rules about under 18yrs olds. Hope this helps a bit

Answer 2

First, you would need to start this study before the people are up in age. Starting it when they are already older could mask certain symptoms of memory loss that started in earlier years.

You would need to know their family history--for instance, did anyone related to them suffer with Alzheimer's, etc. You would need to test their memories - to see what they remember now. You would have to follow them year by year to retest them, and to see how much (if any) memory loss has occurred.

I think that you would need to have some medications or supplements available that would help people with memory. You would divide the people in two groups, give half the med/sup and the other group a placebo. It might even be best done as a double-blind (where even you don't know which group has the real pills).

You would measure how much memory loss occurred within each group, for the purpose of finding out how effective the medicine or supplement is.

Answer 3

How boring would the world be if every one parented the same? There's never going to be a utopian society. There's never going to be the perfect way to parent or perfect people to carry out the perfect way to parent. Spanking has been around forever and it doesn't seem to have caused a big problem. Unless those studies are saying spankings are the root cause of wars and terrorism. Personally, my kids are pretty good most of the time, so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, because we know that next year there will be a new study saying the first study was wrong.