Help Request Re: Coming Up with a Psych/Memory Experiment

[Macdaddy Warsaw]

Hey all, I feel a have a definite lack of creativity when it comes to things like coming up with an interesting theoretical question to answer through an experiment. I'm currently in a psychology of memory class and one of our assignments is to research a certain aspect of memory research and try to develop a theoretical question and design an experiment to try to answer that question. I'm not asking anybody to research it for me or to even help design the experiment. I'm just having difficulty coming up with some novel (and even something not so novel) questions to ask.

An example the professor gave us is that we can't simply ask a question like "does distraction affect how much people can remember?". We should ask a question such as "Does distraction affect older adults more than young adults?", because it would tell us something about aging and memory.

Anyway, the best I've come up with is something about possible differences between race and types of memory for certain things. I haven't really been able to flesh it out though. For some reason I was thinking about how Inuits might be able to remember certain things better than others, but I wouldn't know what Inuits would have to remember better than other people.

Any help would be appreciated.

(Moderators, if this is too psychology-based, please move it to the SMP or Psych forum, but OOT definitely has some creative minds and this is where I spend most of my time on 2+2.)

[guids]

Is it possible to train yourself to totally discount distraction while memorizing? Ie., blackjack card counters + drinking + pitbosses.

[foureightsuited]

perhaps how different races memorize lists of culturally/racial centered constructs or ideas. I remember something in my intro to psych class about how facial recognition within a race was much better than between races, perhaps other parts of memory/the brain work like this. Not sure howd you would come up with these lists, but its just a thought.

[Macdaddy Warsaw]

A shameless bump hoping that the night crowd can come up with something.

[EliteNinja]

How about the effects of memorization while multi-tasking. Say you were to memorize a series of numbers or words while doing two other tasks. Vary the tasks.
eg.)
- throwing and catching a ball
- having a conversation - vary the topics
- drawing something with the dominant hand
- drawing something with the non-dominant hand

Hope it helps.