Does Age Affect the Ability to Remember?

Bonnie Carr believed that older people had worse memory than younger people. Therefore, when considering a topic for her science fair project, she decided to test how age affects your ability to remember.

Project display for “Does age affect the ability to remember?”

Hypothesis

I believe that age negatively impacts the ability to remember.

Experimental variables

Age groups whose memory will be tested

Measured variables

The number of correct answers that each subject gives

Controls

The memory test given to each subject

Experimental groups

• 10-19 year olds
• 20-39 year olds
• 40-59 year olds
• 60-79 year olds

Materials

• Four game cards from Stare game
• Timer
• Four groups of five participants

Procedures

1. Show the group a Stare card for 30 seconds.
2. Hide the card.
3. Have each participant answer five questions about the card shown.
4. Record the number of correct answers.
5. Repeat the procedure for the other groups.

Results

• 10-19 year olds: 56 percent correct
• 20-39 year olds: 47 percent correct
• 40-59 year olds: 55 percent correct
• 60-79 year olds: 48 percent correct

Conclusions

My hypothesis that age would negatively affect memory was incorrect. I found only very slight differences in the number of correct answers by age group.

One possible reason can be that adults were more familiar with the objects that I used. Altering the age ranges may improve my project, because the first range was 10 years, and all other ranges were 20 years.

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