Re: What types of info. do i need on a project on Age v. Learning Ability?

The effect of age on learning is a very well-studied topic, with hundreds 
of published articles in academic journals. Some of the journals are: 
Psychological Review, Cognitive Psychology, Annual Review of Psychology, 
Aging, and Memory. You can find them in university libraries in the 
psychology section.

Most of this work is on how aging effects memory.  There are several 
sources of information that might be more accessible than the journals.  
Some examples are: a textbook on cognitive psychology, the National 
Institute on Aging (part of the National Institutes of Health .. see their 
web site), the online memory "exhibit" put up by a science museum called 
the Exploratorium (http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html) and 
possibly online psychology demonstrations such as  http://olias.arc.nasa.gov/cognition/tutorials/index.html

You could try running your own experiment.  The idea here would be to first 
develop a memory test.  Here are a few examples:
  
- read people a list of 25 animals then ask them to write down as many as 
they can remember.  This tests "recall."
- read people the list, wait a while (say 5 minutes), then show them a list 
of 10 animals some of which were on the old list and some not.  See how 
many they get right.  Count false positives (errors in which they say 
something was on the list when it actually wasn't) separately from false 
negatives (errors where they say it wasn't on the list but it was).  This 
is a test of "recognition."
- make 3 lists of the above sort, one for animals, one for other things 
(maybe fruits or cars or whatever).  Run the recall test for the first 
list.  Do the same for the second list but wait 2 minutes after reading it 
before asking them to write down what they remember.  Do it again for the 
third  list but this time wait 4 minutes.  This shows how recall ability is 
affected by the passage of time.

The next step is find a set of people who vary in age and "run" them in 
your experiement.  The next step is to analyze your data.  The simplest 
thing is to graph age (the x-axis) vs. percent correct (y-axis).  You can 
graph false positives and negatives separately.  You should expect to see 
some decline in recall with age.  I'm not sure what will happen with 
recognition.

Good luck!