14 DAY TRIAL // With so many differences between the brain of a woman and that of a man, no wonder they work differently. Studies are decoding little by little these cognitive differences. A new research published in the journal "Current Directions in Psychological Science" reveals how memory abilities vary between the sexes.
The team made by psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman, in Stockholm, Sweden, has detected significant sex differences in episodic memory, a kind of long-term memory based on personal experiences, which appeared to be more developed in women.
Women clearly outperformed men in verbal episodic memory tasks, like remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men were better than women in recalling symbolic, non-linguistic data called visuospatial processing. Such an example is the fact that a man is more likely to remember his way out of the forest. But for a woman, it is easier to remember where the car keys were left, a task soliciting both verbal and visuospatial memories.
"In addition, women are better than men at remembering faces, especially of females, and the reason seems to be that women allocate more attention to female than to male faces," wrote the authors.
The research team put 3 groups of volunteers to watch black and white images of hairless, androgynous faces denominated 'female faces,' 'male faces' or just 'faces.' It appeared that women could recall with higher precision the androgynous faces presented as female than the androgynous faces said to be male.
Moreover, women outperformed men in tasks involving little to no verbal processing, like recognition of familiar odors, and that advantage boomed in cases requiring more verbal memory and less visuospatial memory. External factors, like education, appear to influence the magnitude of these sex differences, pointing that it is more about sex than genes in the case of these abilities.