Sex & Short-Term Memory

One of the most common narratives portrayed in the media consists of the bumbling husband or boyfriend who has forgotten such significant events as his partner's birthday, or their one-year anniversary, or even Valentine's Day. He scrambles around frantically in an attempt to disguise his lack of preparedness, lest his partner discover how poor he is at remembering crucial and symbolic milestones. Regardless of whether or not he succeeds, hilarity generally ensues and the stereotype of the careless, insensitive male is further cemented in popular culture. Indeed, the general population does express the belief that women have a better memory than men, and it is tough to say whether this recurring theme in entertainment is a product of this belief, or if it is the influence that has lead to the widespread assumption that women are better at remembering (Knox 1; Loftus et al. 19). In any case, research has shown that this universal notion can only be partially validated; while women are generally superior when it comes to long-term memory and aspects of short-term memory such as multitasking and remembering faces, men excel in other areas that require an equally high short-term memory capacity ("Sex Differences in Memory"; Knox 3; Speck et al. 2583).

Short-term memory (STM) is defined by Revlin as the system that facilitates the successful performance of "moment-to-moment" activities, such as retaining mental shopping lists and remembering phone numbers (119). As implied by its name, STM describes the compartment of the human mind that can only hold so much information—about 7 unrelated items—for approximately 18 seconds at a time (Revlin 120-125). Baddeley refers to the mechanical component of STM that is not concerned with storage as "working memory," in order to "emphasize its functional role as a system that underpins complex cognitive activities... [and] supports our capacity for mental work and coherent thought" (43). There are a number of theories and models that have been developed to determine the capacity, duration, retrieval aspects, and functional organization of any given individual's STM (Revlin 120-129; Speck et al. 2581). The questions of if and how gender plays a role in a person's STM capabilities and working memory is one that has been visited and revisited over time, but has generally yielded fairly consistent results: one sex does not dominate the other in terms of which has a more functional STM, rather, men and women maintain their own respective skills regarding different areas of STM ("Sex Differences in Memory"; Loftus et al. 82).

Women maintain superiority in the following STM-related skillsets: facial recognition, verbal memory, and multi-tasking. In an experiment conducted by Knox et al., men and women were asked to examine a "virtual room" that featured photographs of faces hanging on each wall (2). Upon exiting, they were then asked to match the photos to their corresponding places on the walls of the virtual room; the men averaged 21.2% accuracy, while the women averaged 61.1% accuracy (Knox et al. 2). These results provide adequate justification as to why women are more adept at remembering things such as the location of the car keys, and identifying familiar faces in a crowd ("Sex Differences in Memory").

Historically, men have displayed a stronger spatial memory than women, even when both genders exprience the same lack in sleep ("Sex Differences in Memory"; Loftus et al. 82). What this means is that men are generally better at remembering things such as where the car is parked, driving directions (Loftus et al. 71) and, as exemplified in "Sex Differences in Memory," how to get out of the woods. This accounts for another popular Hollywood trope: that in which the ditzy female is incapable of navigating her way out of a paper bag much less a foreign city or, heaven forbid, the wilderness. In turn, the male party finds himself responsible for stepping up and exercising his remarkable mastery of spatial STM in order to rush to the featherbrained damsel's aid.

Studies conducted on gender differences in working memory provide the answer as to why men and women display separate proficiencies when it comes to STM. According to Speck et al., during brain activation in working memory, "men [generally show] symmetric activation or right brain dominance, [while] women predominantly [activate] the left hemisphere during all the tasks" (2583). It is commonly believed that the right side of the brain represents the more intuitive, imaginative aspects of thinking that are often associated with creative problem-solving, and that the left is the designated logical side of the brain that deals with the retention of critical concepts such as math and language. This may account for the female tendency to retain short-term verbal memories more adeptly than men.

However, in terms of spatial memory, Speck et al., found that men and women displayed opposite lateralized activation than what is considered to be typical (2584). When given the task of solving a maze, the male subjects who participated in the experiment conducted by Speck et al., demonstrated left-brain activation that led them to solve the maze significantly faster than the right-brained females (2584). So it would seem that the tasks that elicit a left-brained response are more easily completed, and that whichever gender experiences this response is that which will experience a greater degree of success.

There are a few other factors that contribute to the gender-related differences in STM. Loftus et al. uses the example of a man and a woman who go to the same university and, one day, attend the same lecture (76). The memories that each will likely retain at the end of the lecture differ significantly, but continue to fall in line with the evidence provided so far throughout this paper: the woman will recall the appearances of the lecturer and the other students in the room, as well as the contents of the lecture itself and the subsequent conversations elicited by that content, while the man "might be better able to generate a map of the auditorium in which the lecture was given" (Loftus et al. 76). This is an illustration of the simple fact that men and women focus on different details for different reasons. It is possible that women are better equipped to remember things such as faces, shopping lists, birthdays, conversations and phone numbers due to their focus on the social aspects of any given situation (Loftus et al. 82). Men, on the other hand, generally exhibit the tendency to focus more intently on the big picture, and are less concerned with the details of a conversation—for example—than they are with the location in which that conversation took place, where they were situated in the room, and the route they took to the parking lot following the encounter (Loftus et al. 76).

With this information, it would seem that gender doesn't play an entirely significant role in STM. It appears to be more likely that the specific interests of the individual are those driving forward their independent memory skills. Men are not great at remembering names and faces; women are not great with directions or efficiently solving mazes. Both of these shortcomings can potentially be credited to a mere polarity of interests, as it is safe to assume that men and women both possess the same baseline of cognitive abilities.

So, to revisit the oafish male figure from earlier, who cannot seem to keep the details of his social life in well enough order to remember special occasions for he and his partner, it is possible that his clumsiness is less about his inability to retain the information, and more about his lack of interest in those kinds of social technicalities. At the same time, his female counterpart who appears to be incapable of navigating her way back home from an under-visited section of town, might have better luck if the road were paved with faces. In a way it balances out, as her lack of direction will buy him a little extra time to potentially compose a love poem that he'll never give a second thought to, and that she will memorize quickly and remember forever.

Works Cited

Baddeley, A. D. "Working memory: An overview." Working memory and education, 2006, pp. 1-31.

Knox, Richard, et al. "Short term memory based on gender." Pennsylvania: Penn State University, 2007.

Loftus, Elizabeth F., et al. "Who remembers what? Gender differences in memory." Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 26, 1987, pp. 64-85.

Revlin, Russell. "Short Term Memory and Working Memory." Cognition: Theory and practice. New York, NY: Worth Publishers, 2013.

"Sex Differences In Memory: Women Better Than Men At Remembering Everyday Events."ScienceDaily, 21 February 2008, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm.

Speck, Oliver, et al. "Gender differences in the functional organization of the brain for working memory." Neuroreport, vol. 11, no. 11, 2000, pp. 2581-2585.