Differences In Episodic Memory

In the scientific paper, Sex Differences in Episodic Memory, Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman, researched if there are sex differences in memory. They first established that there are two different types of memory: working and long-term. They then said that long-term memory can be broken down into subsystems, which include episodic memory. Episodic memory involves a conscious recollection of specific memories at a particular point in time.

Researcher Maccoby and Jacklin did not find sex differences in memory during their studies in 1974, but recent studies show that there might be sex differences in episodic memory, that favor women. A recent study involved a large group of participants who had to remember a lists of words that were presented

Some researchers have hypothesized that women are able to use their verbal abilities to recognize faces by verbalizing them. Research was performed to test this hypothesis by preventing the participants from being able to verbalize the faces of the people they were shown. The results showed that women still were able to recognize more faces than men were able to, despite not being able to use verbal processing. The results also showed that women were able to recognize the faces of other women more easily than the faces of males, whereas men tended to remember male and female faces equally well (Herlitz, 2008). Further studies on this showed evidence showed that women in fact devote more attention in remembering women’s faces than males faces. Studies with infants also show that infant girls spend more time looking at faces than infant boys do, which can give women an advantage in their face recognizing abilities.

Another focus on sex differences in memory has been whether the significance of these differences vary across an individual’s lifetime. This would explain if biological changes, such as puberty, are accountable for sex differences in memory. Though there hasn’t been much research, data has shown that biological development correlated with aging and development do not influence the magnitude of sex differences in episodic-memory tasks (Herlitz,

Women just simply have shown tendencies to be better at men in verbal-production episodic memory tasks and it has been observed that men have been better than women at visuospatial tasks. The couple will then have a better understanding how gender differences work in memory and this will hopefully lead them to do some research as to whether or not there are other gender differences that can have an affect on their