Gender differences in short time memory

Ingried De Nicols
Alexia Ramos Gonsen
Vanessa Plascencia Carbajal

3/31/16
Cuernavaca Morelos

Introduction

Memory is the power of the mind to recall something you have experienced through 3
stages: encoding, storage and retrieval of data, whether by sight hearing, tasting or
feeling, generally by an association mechanism.
Memory is something that has defined the human race along the years. From ancient
societies legends and important events were passed through generations by speech
and storytelling. Memory has had a very important role in history since it has been
essential for the passing along of all the events, shaped and has been the guide line of
how we know the world today and how we move around in it.
It has been obviously stated that we benefit from having better memory, since it gives us
a large advantage over our peers, better memory helps us give a better performance in
exams, account management, hard thinking jobs and even in personal relationships.
There are cases of gifted people who have photographic memory, an ability to
remember every single thing they see. But not everyone possesses this quality, in fact
there are some people who suffer of long or short term memory loss. For those there
have been mechanism developments that try to help people, especially elderly to
exercise more their memory and accomplish to make it more effective.
There are certain classifications for memory, long term, short term, sensory etc This
social experiment will be focused on short term memory, the ability to recall something
shortly after it happens.
Through this study, it is wanted to prove that female really are capable of retaining more
information when it is accessed shortly after getting than male.

Literature Review
Perceptions of gender differences in cognitive abilities date back to ancient Greece,
from the term hysteria or wandering womb to account for emotional instability and
mental illness in women. This theory survived up until the mid-19th century and the
beginning of the women's suffrage movement, and was used as evidence for womens
inability to handle intellectual work. A lot of important physicians of this era, including
neurologist like Sigmund Freud, argued that women were biologically suited to
homemaking and housework, as they did not have enough blood to power both the
brain and the uterus. When women began attending university in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, opponents asserted that the high demands of post-secondary education
on the female brain prejudice their fertility.

The development of the encephalization quotient by Harry Jerison in 1973 confirmed

popular beliefs and about womens cognitive abilities; this quotient was one of the first
stating the measuring brain size, and it demonstrated that women have, on average,
smaller brain areas than men. Modern neuroscience has since demonstrated that
women compensate for their smaller brains with increased neuronal density, and there
are no differences in cognitive abilities between men and women. Recent
advancements in neuropsychology and cognitive psychology have shown, however, that
specific differences in cognition - including memory - do exist. There is an ongoing
debate about the causes of those differences, with biology, genetics, culture, and
environmental factors.
It has been stated by many scientists and professionals that women and men are
different, in cognitive and physical abilities, men have traits like being more aggressive
and women are sometimes considered to be faster at logical thinking. 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. 1
A study done around 1960 by Broadbent stated that human beings have a limited
attention capacity, which means we have to scan the information to take out the
important parts and discard the less important ones.
Also it has been stated that it is hard for people to remember objects or phrases that are
unrelated to each other, Pearson and Peterson (1959) this is why we must create
systems or mechanisms that work for each person individually to remember small
sentences or things without any obvious relation after a short period of time.
Multitasking can also be something that will alter or diminish your short-term memory.
It was suggested that a type of memory called the working memory is maintaining a
short-term memory of something while doing another task, so in this way short-term
memory could be seen as a more relaxed and easy task, while working memory is a
rather complicated Challenge. According to Herlitz, Nilsson and Backman (1997) there
are no sex differences in working memory at least for adults. But apparently this seems
to be the only report that says that men and women don't show any differences in short,
or in this case working, memory. For example Duff and Hamson (2001) made a report
were women show to have a greater ability in working memory tasks, which according
to them was completely independent from all other cognitive physical or mental abilities.
Another investigation that has proven women to be better at short-term or working
memory is called the Digit Symbol Subtest from Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales
(Wechsler 1981). Which is a test where you have to match symbols with digits and it
generally consists of nine digit symbols, the hard thing about this task is the time limit.
This Neuropsychological analysis is also sensitive to brain damage, depression, age
and dementia, this shows us how it is an accurate test for memory sensing Lezak, M.D.,
1

Howieson, D.B., & Loring, D.W. (2004). The test is also very relevant because
something that has been commonly found in both men and women is the reducing
ability of short-term memory with age (E.G., Janowsky Chavez and Orwell 2000).
The results of a study realized by Susan E. Gathercole from University of Durham with
collabarotion of Susan J. Pickering, Benjamin Ambridge, and Hannah Wearing from the
University of Bristol (2004) showed that humans from 6 years of age have already
developed a basic modular structure of working memory. Research tracing the gradual
decline of memory says that the process begins at the ripe age of 20 and as brain cells
slip away, gone forever (Palazzolo, "Memory Loss Begins at 20", 2016).

Hypothesis
Women have better short term memory than men.

Objectives
General objective

Evaluate if there is a difference in short term memory related to gender of people.

Specific objectives:

Evaluate which gender has better results with the tests created to measure short
term memory using young people aged 15-20.

Materials and Methods

Materials:

50 female participants aged 15-20

50 male participants aged 15-20
Online test that measures short term memory developed by Alexia Ramos
Gonsen. URL:
https://www.onlineexambuilder.com/site/index.php?r=exam/quiz&language=en

The test was done in an online exam software page called QuizWorks, its URL is
https://www.onlineexambuilder.com/ by the student Alexia Ramos Gonsen. The
questions of the test were done in Spanish because our participants speak Spanish.
The test was designed based on another short term memory test found on an article on
http://www.ocu.org/salud/nc/informe/pon-a-prueba-tu-memoria217161, which was
designed by specialists to test participants short term memory, long term memory,
recent memory and work memory. The exercises chosen from this test were only the

ones which tested short term memory. The questions in the exam for this experiment
and the ones from the webpage were not totally equal, the tasks were alike but the
numbers and words asked to be memorized were different.
The sampling technique used was stratified random sampling. The participants were
recruited mostly from students of ITESM Cva aged 15-20 and also via facebook. A
message like this was sended Hola, puedes hacer esta prueba y mandarme tu
resultado y t gnero? https://www.onlineexambuilder.com/examcva/exam-68141
ExamCVA
onlineexambuilder.com. There was the link to the exam. They were asked to send their
grade given by the page when finalized all the questions, also they had to send their
gender.
The test consisted of 9 questions. The exact questions are attached in the Appendix
section. All of the questions had the same value. The possible scores were from 0% to
100% correct answers. The data was summarized using a measurement of descriptive
statistics, which was the mean of each genders results of the test.
Replications: none.
The results from the test were analyzed using Excel 2010. The 100 scores will be
divided by gender, one column for men (with 50 scores) and one for women (with the
other 50 scores). Due to the variabhe TOH used was Two Sample T-Test Assuming
Unequal Variances (with one sample being the results of the test obtained by male
participants and the second sample being the results obtained by women), using a
significance level of a= 0.05. Alpha was compared with p- value of one-tail.
The independent variable will be gender, while the dependent variable will be the results
from the test.

APPENDIX
URL of the online exam: https://www.onlineexambuilder.com/site/index.php?

r=exam/quiz&language=en
Questions asked in that exam:

References :
Agneta Herlitz, Lars-Gran Nilsson, Lars Bckman. Gender differences in episodic
memory, Memory & Cognition, 1997, 801-811, DOI: 10.3758/BF03211324
Duff, S. J., & Hampson, E. (2001). A sex difference on a novel spatial working memory
task in humans. Brain and Cognition, 47, 470493.
Gathercole SE, Pickering SJ, Ambridge B, Wearing H. The structure of working memory
from 4 to 15 years of age. Dev Psychol. 2004 Mar;40(2):177-90. PubMed PMID:
14979759.
Jerison, H. J. (1973). Evolution of the brain and intelligence. New York: Academic
Press.--Found on internet-Lezak, M.D., Howieson, D.B., & Loring, D.W. (2004). Neuropsychological assessment.
New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 368370. ISBN 978-0-19-511121-7.
Lewin, C. (2003). Sex DFifferences in Memory and Other Cognitive Abilities. Retrieved
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Lezak, M. D., Howieson, D. B., & Loring, D. W. (2004). Neuropsychological assessment
(4th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press
Palazzolo, R. (2016, August 14). Memory Loss Begins at 20. Retrieved March 31, 2016,
from http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117281
Peterson, L., & Peterson, M. J. (1959). Short-term retention of individual verbal items.
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