Some effects you could try to create, and some caveats

It's a great topic, though it's a tough one to pin down and draw meaningful conclusions about. One aspect of it is the effect of variables on _motivation_, and another is the effect of variables on _attention_, both of which are relevant to "thinking skills."

Some ideas ...

The literature on the so-called "Hawthorne Effect" is potentially relevant to environment-motivational research, although it relates the effects of broader context on motivation. The "Hawthorne Effect" is based on a classic study by Elton Mayo where employee performance was found to improve under a variety of mutually conflicting environmental conditions, such as increasing the illumination level and decreasing the illumination level. The usual interpretation is that people respond to having attention paid to them. The effect was later found to be much less robust than originally believed however, and it's the kind of thing that you can ask 10 people about and get 10 meaningfully different definitions.
Some background and specifics:
http://www.accel-team.com/motivation/hawthorne_01.html

In the 1970's there were also a number of studies done that examined the effects of color and music on motivation using tests of physical effort. Some of the research was presumably put to use in hospitals to design "quiet rooms" where they could put people to help them calm down when they were agitated (although probably most often a euphemism for isolating, restraining and punishing someone troublesome). If I recall correctly, they did claim to find some moderately reliable effects for different kinds of rhythms and different colors, although I haven't followed up on it recently. I did find one site quoting the conclusions about colors:

http://www.saffronsoul.com/usr/psycho_colors.asp

but with a caveat - when someone talks about "scientific effects" of something without citing their sources, you should usually not take it as very reliable. It does provide some interesting hypotheses that could tested for your project in any case. Some of the things are easily measureable, such as heartrate.

I do remember that a lot of this kind of research was later given a black eye when people began trying to apply it in the form of "applied kinesthesiology," a fancy falsely medical-sounding name for a flaky procedure used by some alternative health practitioners to show how your body supposedly weakens when you do certain things or are exposed to certain things. As with the Hawthorne Effect, most of it turns out to be heavily mediated by suggestion and expectancy, rather than (or in addition to) being an actual effect of the variables being tested. I once conducted an experiment where I was able to show that the same color and same substance under a person's tongue could have two opposite effects depending on how the person was prepared ahead of time. That doesn't prove that the variable had no effect, it just proves that the psychological preparation was an even stronger influence.

Another interesting line of research was an intriguing discovery in one test of audio subliminal influence. They used ostensibly inaudible messages encoded under music, like you find in the popular self-help "subliminal tapes." They used reports of imagery as their dependent variable. The experimenters were expecting to discredit the subliminal audio effect, so they were surprised to find that the imagery people reported was correlated with the tape they used. Different tapes with different messages produced different clusters of imagery in people. Upon closer examination when they repeated the experiment, they found that it was not the putative subliminal message at all, but the type of music they used that determined the kind of imagery people had. Some music evoked water images, and so on.

To me, the most interesting lines involve the effects of rhythms and music on the brain, but there should be plenty of different ideas for you to try.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

One journal article for example, by Todd, 01/16/02 An online resource on color and mood, by Todd, 01/16/02 Baker-Miller Pink, by Todd, 01/16/02 Negative ions, by Todd, 02/07/02

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