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Language and cognitive skills
Gender differences in memory
Who Remembers What?: Gender Differences In Memory
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A. Background Research
It has been a time-consuming belief that women have better multi-tasking skills than men. Multi-tasking involves doing several tasks at once. Multi-tasking uses short-term memory. If women are better at multi-tasking than men, it would seem that they would have better short term memory as well. “In general, the gender-related differences include a wide range of processing skills. It has been shown that females recall the appearance of others better than males and score higher on tasks involving manipulation of phonological and semantic information, episodic and semantic memory, verbal learning, verbal analytical working memory, object location memory, fine motor skills and perceptual speed, while males tend to score higher on tasks involving visuospatial working memory fluid reasoning, and positional reconstruction, or when spatiotemporal analyses are required (González, 2013).” Memory is one the most important cognitive domains in order to have an everyday function. Memory processes storing, encoding, and retrieving information. Short-term memory is the function that temporarily retains stimuli that just have been perceived and is involved in the frontal and temporal cortices.
In many cultures around the world, males are encouraged to be self-assertive and to be able to manage their emotions. Girls on the other hand are encouraged to be social in order to express concern for others and to control their assertiveness. Girls tend to develop faster than boys in their language development. Gender differences on short-term memory tasks focus on differences in strategy use and the difference in women’s adaptation to tasks that require efficient retention of sequences (Kimura, 1999). Males tend to prefer action...
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...d video gaming. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 23(2), 65-76. doi:10.1027/1864-1105/a000038
Porter, B. A., & Kennison, S. M. (2010). Differences in Men's and Women's Knowledge of and Memory for Names. North American Journal of Psychology, 12(3), 433-444.
Rolls, E. T., Dempere-Marco, L., & Deco, G. (2013). Holding Multiple Items in Short Term Memory: A Neural Mechanism. Plos ONE, 8(4), 1-13. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0061078
Saha, G., Halder, S., & DAS, P. (2013). A Comparative study of short term memory and long term memory between athlete and non athlete. Indian Streams Research Journal, 2(12), 1-5.
St. Jacques, P. L., Conway, M. A., & Cabeza, R. (2011). Gender differences in autobiographical memory for everyday events: Retrieval elicited by SenseCam images versus verbal cues. Memory, 19(7), 723-732. doi:10.1080/09658211.2010.516266
...Baddeley (1966) study of encoding in the short term memory and long term memory supports the MSM model on the mode of processing such that words are processed on recall and both models share the same opinion that processing does influence recall. Finally, the MSM model of memory states that all information is stored in the long term memory, however, this interpretation contrasts with that of Baddeley (1974) who argue that we store different types of memories and it is unlikely that they occur only in the LTM store. Additionally, other theories have recognised different types of memories that we experience, therefore it is debatable that all these different memories occur only in the long-term memory as presumed by the multi-store model which states the long term memory store as with unlimited capacity, in addition it also fails to explain how we recall information.
Both male and female brains are different and extends into a difference of what they can
Gould, Stephen J. "Women's Brains." Fields of Reading. 6th ed. Ed. Nancy R. Comley et al. New York: St. Martin's, 2001.
It is commonly argued that female and males are very different with respect to their personal characteristics, such as motivational issues and experience. (Liebermale, 2002) Even when female and males have the same characteristics, there is still some difference with respect to their behaviour and the outcome of their activities.
The authors developed three hypotheses that propose results would show statistically significant gender differences in social groupings, language preferences, and in the amount of time that the study’s participants spent on different cognitive tasks while playing in school and at home (Mathur and Parameswaran, 2015).
How does memory affect the way in which history is viewed? Memory is based on a series of decisions on what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. It is a process of suppressing history that is unbearable or difficult, yet it is also about reflecting on what is misunderstood. Memory is formed through several influencing factors and elements; Memory can be formed by the study of pop culture and icons, which often propose a reexamination of difficult and repressed memories. Memory is also influenced through exclusions and biases. These can be racially or politically motivated, but they could also derive from personal or cultural trauma. Recorded history such as textbooks, novels,
Memory is a group of related mental processes that are involved in acquiring, storing, and retrieving information (Hockenberry and Hocenberry page 232). I will be addressing two specific types of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory holds temporary information transferred from sensory memory or long-term memory. Sensory memory is the first stage of memory and obtains information for a brief amount of time. Short-term memory is also called active memory and is stored in the prefrontal cortex which is the most active part of the brain during an activity. Short-term memory can hold information for roughly twenty seconds, but sensory memory holds information for a shorter amount of time. We usually store things such
Introduction The topic of gender differences must understandably be approached with caution in our modern world. Emotionally charged and fraught with ideas about political correctness, gender can be a difficult subject to address, particularly when discussed in correlation to behavior and social behavior. Throughout history, many people have strove to understand what makes men and women different. Until the modern era, this topic was generally left up to religious leaders and philosophers to discuss. However, with the acquisition of more specialized medical knowledge of human physiology and the advent of anthropology, we now know a great deal more about gender differences than at any other point in history.
Making and storing memories is a complex process involving many regions of the brain. (3). Most experts agree that we have two stages of memories - short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory is the immediate memory we have when we first hear or perceive someth...
Although, there is proof of cognitive and mental variations in the way that two genders process information. For example, women are shown to be more adept at verbal communication and comprehension while men tend to perform better in the visual-spatial category. On the topic of memory, studies show that women are more sensory and memory oriented. In one study at the University of Edinburgh, psychologist Stuart Ritchie and a team of researchers compared data from many different male and female subjects. As Micheal Price states, “Adjusting for age, on average, they found that women tended to have significantly thicker cortices than men. Thicker cortices have been associated with higher scores on a variety of cognitive and general intelligence tests. Meanwhile, men had higher brain volumes than women in every subcortical region they looked at, including the hippocampus (which plays broad roles in memory and spatial awareness), the amygdala (emotions, memory, and decision-making), striatum (learning, inhibition, and reward-processing), and thalamus (processing and relaying sensory information to other parts of the brain).” (Price 2017). So indeed there are differences, however the similarities between genders far outweigh the differences. McGraw-Hill Higher Education argues that “More equivocal are gender differences in activity level, dependency, timidity, exploratory activity, and vulnerability to stress. There are no gender differences in sociability, conformity, achievement, self-esteem, or verbal hostility (Child Psychology).” In turn proving many once believed facts such as “women and men communicate differently, it's biology” into preconceived
Research studies established by Herlitz, Nilsson, and Backman prove that sex differences favor women when it comes to episodic memory. In this research experiment these psychologists took about 1,000 applicants, both male and female, between ages of 35 – 80, and asked them to remember a list of words; the study showed that women outperformed men by 25 percent. Coming to the conclusion that, since women were able to recall more words than men they evidently had the better episodic memory. Furthermore this article expands upon this subcategory of memory by describing the two types of tasks involved with it: verbal-production ta... ...
Communication is an essential part of human life. People perceive things in a different way because of ethnic background differences, attitudes and beliefs, etc. These differences may affect our ability to communicate with our counterpart. Therefore, it is necessary to keep our mind open so that we can reduce the risk of communication breakdown. Men and women are different as everyone knows that. However, their differences are no just physiological and anatomical. Recent researches have concluded that there are remarkable differences between the two genders in the way their brains process information, language, emotion, cognition etc. Scientists have discovered the differences in the way men and women carry out mental functions like judging speed, estimating time, spatial visualization and positioning, mental calculation. Men and women are strikingly different not only in these tasks but also in the way their brains process language. This could account for the reason why there are overwhelmingly more male mathematicians, pilots, mechanical engineers, race car drivers and space scientists than females. On the other hand, there are areas in which women outperform men. Women are naturally endowed with better communication and verbal abilities. They are also effective than men in some of the tasks like emotional empathy, establishing human relations, carrying out pre-planned tasks and creative expressions (Kimura 1999).
Ryle (2013) claims the gender schema theory is constructed on the frameworks of both cognitive development and social learning theory which seeks to explain how individuals become gendered in society. The theory was developed by Sandra Bem (1981) arguing that cultural influences predominantly impact how children establish and develop their ideas about what it means to be a man or women. The theory proposes that to learn such definitive information
Long-term memory is how humans process in the present, recall information from the past, or think about the future. Without long-term memory one cannot remember past memories, today, or what we may plan to do in the future. On top of that, there is no learning without long-term memory and the progress that we see today in our fast pace driven world would not exist. This is why the study and understanding of long-term memory is important for further knowledge of human nature. The long-term memory itself takes in many different forms of information including images, sounds, and meaning. The orientation of memory encompasses three important stages and the first is encoding. Encoding takes places in different locations inside the brain and this
According to Sternberg (1999), memory is the extraction of past experiences for information to be used in the present. The retrieval of memory is essential in every aspect of daily life, whether it is for academics, work or social purposes. However, many often take memory for granted and assume that it can be relied on because of how realistic it appears in the mind. This form of memory is also known as flashbulb memory. (Brown and Kulik, 1977). The question of whether our memory is reliably accurate has been shown to have implications in providing precise details of past events. (The British Psychological Association, 2011). In this essay, I would put forth arguments that human memory, in fact, is not completely reliable in providing accurate depictions of our past experiences. Evidence can be seen in the following two studies that support these arguments by examining episodic memory in humans. The first study is by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) who found that memory can be modified by suggestions. The second study is by Naveh-Benjamin and Craik (1995) who found that there is a predisposition for memory to decline with increasing age.