Have you ever had a disagreement with an opposite sex and later realized that the opinion of the female was actually true about the incidence? Although, more often than none, African men find it difficult to uphold a woman’s opinion as true, but psychologists from the Karolinska Institutet in Solna, Sweden, have recently shown that females may have an advantage when it comes to episodic memory.
There are different types of memory that collectively allow humans to survive and thrive in the world, and one key type of memory is that which scientists called “episodic.”
Experts define episodic memories as the memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place. For example, if one remembers the party on his 6th birthday, this is an episodic memory.
Previous studies have shown that women also have a superior memory for verbal information, which they may use to dissect a person’s underlying motives or intentions.
The team explained that women are better on average than men at remembering faces, particularly female faces. Remembering details of personal experiences is important for monitoring and maneuvering relationships, including disrupting the social and romantic ties of other women who are competitors, he says.
However, not everyone can recall all types of episodic memories equally well.
One way to illustrate this is by thinking about disagreements in heterosexual couples: While one partner may explain that he/she is upset about a particular event from the past, the other partner may not even remember that the event ever took place.
Many factors can influence a person’s ability to recall episodic memories, among which are age-related cognitive decline and cognitive decline related to preclinical dementia.
However, a person’s biological sex may also play a role, according to the research, the study analyzed evidence from hundreds of studies looking at how members of the two sexes remember episodic information.
According to the findings on medicalnewstoday, which now appear in the journal psychological bulletin indicated that women are better at remembering certain types of episodic memories than men.
Lead researcher Prof. Agneta Herlitz and team conducted a meta-analysis of 617 studies that took place in 1973–2013, including more than 1.2 million participants overall.
The first study author Martin Asperholm, a doctoral student at the Karolinska Institutet explained that the results showed that there is a slight female advantage in episodic memory, and that advantage varies depending on which materials are to be remembered.
She also added that women in particular appear to be better at remembering speech, where they left an object, and what happened in a movie. They are also more apt at remembering faces and sensory images. Men, on the other hand, seem to be better at recalling abstract information and navigational data.
Prof. Agneta Herlitz also stressed that generally, women perform better when it comes to remembering verbal information, such as words, sentences, texts, and objects, but also the location of objects, and movies. Men can better recall abstract images and remember their way back from one location to another.
“Furthermore, there is a female advantage when it comes to remembering faces and with sensory memories, such as smells”, Prof. Herlitz added.
Since the data the scientists analyzed indicated that there are indeed subtle differences between what women and men are good at remembering, this could have different effects on their daily lives.
Future research might explore this avenue in an effort to find out whether, or to what extent, members of the two sexes experience the world in distinct ways.
