By: Elisha Bigayan Mr. Leingang’s sixth period Science Class

What improves short term memory more, sugar-eating or exercise?

As I test how exercising and sugar eating affects short term memory, then exercising will increase a person’s memory more because exercising is healthier and being healthy increases brain power.

Manipulated Variable= the activity – sugar eating and exercise. Responding Variable= your memory – how many letters you can remember. Controlled Variable= time to look at the letters (1 min), time to do the activity (10 min)

Three people to test Timer Cupcakes/candy or sweets 10 Random letters DDR game & pad

1.Set up all my materials. 2.Get one person and let him/her look at the 10 letters for 2 minutes. 3.Then, after 10 minutes of exercising, let them write what letters they remember. (Doesn’t have to be in order.) 4.Record how many letters they remembered. 5.Repeat steps 2-4 for sugar eating part where you have to eat 3 cupcakes for each trial. 6.Repeat steps 2-5 for the other people.

StudentsTrial One: Sugar Eating. Trial One: Exercising Trial Two: Sugar Eating. Trial Two: Exercising. 110/109/1010/109/10 28/105/104/109/10 310/10 Words Remembered. Sugar Eating AverageExercising Average 8.67

The purpose of my experiment was to find out whether exercising or sugar eating improved short term memory more. Before I started my experiment I believed that exercising would make you memorize the words more since, the movement of your body would also exercise your mind and the exercise is healthier than eating sugar. There weren’t really any major errors but, there were a few minor errors. Like, Maida screaming at Megan which really ruins someone’s concentration. What I learned from completing this project is that exercising and sugar eating both affect memory the same. What I could’ve done different is that I could’ve done a different type of exercising.

I predicted that if I test how sugar eating and exercising affected memory then, exercising would increase memory more. My results show that exercising and sugar eating both have the same affect on memory. My lowest amount was 4 words remembered on my second trial of sugar eating. My highest amount of words remember was 10 which was shown on both sugar eating and exercising. Both of the averages were approximately The difference is zero. This doesn’t support my hypothesis. Therefore if I test how sugar eating and exercise affect memory, then they would have the same affect.