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21 February 2008
Male Memory Minimal 
There are significant gender differences in episodic memory, a type of long-term memory based on personal experiences, with women demonstrating much better recall than men, a study in Current Directions in Psychological Science has found. Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Stockholm, Sweden, sought to answer the question of whether one's gender influences the ability to remember every day events. Their surprising findings did, in fact, determine significant sex differences in episodic memory. Specific results indicated that women excelled in verbal episodic memory tasks, such as remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperformed women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing. For example, the results indicate a man would be more likely to remember his way out of the woods. However, there were also sex differences favoring women on tasks such as remembering the location of car keys, which requires both verbal and visuospatial processing. In additional studies, psychologists also discovered that women perform better than men in tasks requiring little to no verbal processing, such as recognition of familiar odors, and that the female episodic memory advantage increases when women utilize verbal abilities and decreases when visuospatial abilities are required. The researchers concluded that while the probability of genetically-based differences between the quality of male and female memory remains unknown, the results suggest that females currently hold the advantage in episodic memory. Related:
Men's Brains: Equal But Different
Surprise, Surprise, Men Have Sex On The Brain
Source: Current Directions in Psychological Science
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