Psychologists divide memory into three stores: sensory store, short-term store, and long-term store. After entering the sensory store, some information proceeds into the short-term store. From there some information proceeds to the long term store. These stores are refered to as short term memory and long term memory respectively.
Short-term memory has two important characteristics. First, short-term memory can contain at any one time seven, plus or minus two, "chunks" of information. Second, items remain in short-term memory around twenty seconds.
Long-term memory is stored in our brains forever, according to most psychologists. We use recall to retrieve memories.
Since your experiment can not go on forever, I suggest you stick with short-term memory.
Project Ideas:
- Prove that people will remember more numbers if given the numbers in "chunks." You do this by giving them a list of one digit numbers first, see how many they can remember and record that. Then give a list of two digit numbers, etc.
- If you use words, rather than numbers, use all nouns, so that the person you are testing can not make a sentence out of the words you have given. Most people have learned to "chunk" things together.
- Test gender differences. Do males remember more or less than females?
- Test the language factor. What do people remember better: numbers, words or a series of colors?
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