Memory Differences Between Males and Females - Term Paper Example

 Memory Differences Between Males and Females               Memory Differences Between Males and Females When it comes to memory and learning, there have been several claims that women are better than men in this particular cognitive aspect. However, there are others who claim the opposite. As a result of this research, it has been found out that there are almost as many studies that claim that women are better than men as there are studies that claim the opposite. These findings have a few implications in the field of psychology and education. Firstly, men and women differ according to the type of memory that they have encoded. According to a report by ScienceDaily.com, in an article entitled “Sex Differences in Memory: Women Better than Men at Remembering Everyday Events,” women performed well in terms of verbal episodic memory tasks. This refers to remembering everyday events as well as pictures, objects and words. Women were also better than men when it came to remembering faces, especially those of females because of the attention that females put into the faces of someone of their fellow gender. Moreover, women were also good at remembering the location of objects like car keys, which somehow demonstrate a quality of integrating both verbal and visuospatial processing (Sex Differences in Memory, 2008). On the other hand, the same report states that in a particular study, men were better than women when it came to symbolic information that did not involve language, and this is known as visuospatial processing (Sex Differences in Memory, 2008). An example of this is remembering how one should find his way out of a building or out of a forest. Another study somehow agrees with the findings published by ScienceDaily.com, but some inconsistencies found when human data was compared with experimental data from rats suggest that there is actually no difference between male and female memory. According to Shors (2002), men usually outperform women when it comes to mental and spatial rotation tasks, while women perform better when it comes to spatial location in a static environment. This means that men can actually easily remember direction if the situation involves movement, such as finding one’s way through the forest or the path in the maze that one has walked through. On the other hand, females can remember something more if the scenario does not involve any form of movement, like remembering the shape of the kitchen sink or the exact appearance of the interior of the bathroom. Based on the findings of Shors (2002), men may miss out some details when it comes to static environments. Nevertheless, the same research study actually found out that female rats “perform best on tasks that require activity such as active avoidance, and do quite poorly on those that require immobility,” which somehow renders the findings of the study inconclusive (Shors, 2002). However, the study of Shors seems to be the only study which proposes a lack of significant difference between the way males and females remember things. There is always a difference in the memory processing of males and females. According to Dalla et al. (2008), when it comes to learning through memory work, female rats fared better than the males. Using a technique called trace eyeblink conditioning, which is a task that is believed to enhance the survival of new cells, it has been found out that females did better than males, thus resulting in the survival of many new cells in the female hippocampus. In short, if one were to simplify the implications of the results, females generally learn better than males through memory, and that the result of learning is the survival of neurons in the hippocampus. Although this study does not really assume any significant implication of the findings on neurogenesis, one can somehow conclude that females are better at maintaining and triggering neurogenesis of neurons compared to males, and this may even have implications in neuropathology. The findings of Herlitz and Rehnman (2008) also somehow agree with everything that has been mentioned so far about the differences between males and females when it comes to memory processing, but somehow clarifies that age is not a significant factor in such differences. However, the authors add that the differences between males and females in terms of memory appear even before puberty like the age of five. These differences, however, remain constant and do not increase towards adulthood. This somehow implies that major biological changes associated with secondary sexual development and aging never influence the differences between males and females when it comes to the type of memory it encodes (Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008). Voyer et al. (2007) somehow agrees with the findings of the previous studies but adds more insights when it comes to differences in the perception of either the location of the object or its identity. When it comes to object identity memory tasks, the results clearly showed that women fared better than men (Voyer et al., 2007). This implies that women were better at identifying who or what a person is even if the object was introduced only fairly recently. Moreover, when it comes to object location memory, females also have an overall advantage. However, the study further found out that object location memory has a statistically significant dependence on age and the type of object in question. Specifically, the older the person, the sharper his memory is when it comes to object location, thus, according to Voyer et al. (2007), “the emergence of these gender differences in object location memory are quite small during childhood and occur only with puberty.” This is actually opposite to the findings of Herlitz and Rehnman (2008). Moreover, according to Voyer et al. (2007), aside from age, another statistically significant factor when it comes to object location memory is the type of the object in question. In this respect, women were able to successfully determine the locations of various feminine objects, which unfortunately the study only vaguely described. On the other hand, males successfully identified masculine objects, i.e. those which were geometrical in shape. Moreover, when it comes to determining the distance of the object, males generally fared better than females (Voyer et al., 2007). However, in contrast with scientific data which always favors females, the study by Gresack and Frick et al. (2003) concluded that males are better than females when it comes to working and reference memory. In the experiment conducted by the authors, the male mice committed significantly fewer errors when it came to both working and reference memory tasks. Moreover, even as the working memory load increased, the male mice still made fewer errors when it came to the same memory tasks. However, despite the conclusions they have made, the authors believed that a possible source of error is that fact that the females swam faster than the males in the experiment, which actually involved swimming through a maze. Thus, the fact that the females swam faster somehow made them either commit more mistakes directly, or gave them more stress that eventually made them register more errors than the females did. Moreover, considering that obviously both male and female mice experienced stress in the process, the morphological differences of the hippocampus of as well as differences in the neurochemical response to stress by both male and female mice may have greatly affected the number of errors made after a stressful experience in the experiment (Gresack & Frick et al., 2003). Another possible explanation for the differences between males and females and the general advantage of the males when it comes to working and reference memory is the numerous sexual dimorphisms present in several regions of the brain. For example, in the hippocampus, males have more mossy fiber synapses and dentate granule cells compared to females. Moreover, this part has “greater slice excitability” as well as a higher activity of glutamic acid decarboxylase (Gresack & Frick et al., 2003). Another sexual dimorphism is found in the neocortex, where there is lateral cortical thickness in males. A third sexual dimorphism is the fact that the dentate granules and the CA3 pyramidal cells of the hippocampus are actually filled with dendritic branches among the males (Gresack & Frick et al., 2003). Another explanation for differences between males and females when it comes to reference and working memory is the activational effects of sex-steroid hormones in both genders – although this explanation does not necessarily provide an explanation as to why males fared better than females in this particular scientific experiment. When it comes to the sex hormones, in males, the activation of testosterone may possibly and favorably “modulate hippocampal and neocortical morphology and function” when it comes to working and reference memory (Gresack & Frick et al., 2003). In short, the experiment by Gresack and Frick et al. (2003) shows us that anatomically and physiologically, males are at a greater advantage than females when it comes to working and reference memory, and that the latter gender can only seem to accept their own weaknesses for these weaknesses are based on a cellular level. However, the findings of Gresack and Frick et al. (2003) somehow contradict all the results of the previously mentioned studies concerning the dominance of females in the memory area and the specialization of the female memory when it comes to episodic, verbal-spatial, and fixed-environment spatial memory. Other studies yielded the same results as those that concluded on the advantage of males over females when it comes to memory and learning. Based on a much later study by Guo et al. (2011) using male and female mandarin voles and mice, male rodents showed a significant advantage when it came to spatial learning as well as various memory tasks. Moreover, males also performed better than females in other aspects of the experiment such as platform crossings, peripheral zone, and escape latency. Thus, what is obvious at this point is that the male species are once again better than the females. However, what should clearly be noted in this particular experimental study is that overall, it is not the difference in gender that matters but rather the difference in the species. In fact, mandarin voles swam faster than the mice for both genders. The slow speed of the mice is an indicator of poor performance in learning tasks as well as memory retention activities. Besides, the advantage of the mandarin voles when it comes to this aspect is a factor that depends on its lifestyle as an animal that lives in complicated underground holes and mazes and in almost complete darkness. The subterranean burrows may in fact explain why the senses of the mandarin vole are actually trained when it comes to spatial learning and memory. Nevertheless, the point of this study is that perhaps the difference in memory and learning is actually not in one’s gender but actually in one’s lifestyle. In short, the study somehow proved that memory and learning may actually be a matter of nurture than nature, which is contrary to what all the previous studies have underlined. At this point, therefore, there is so much confusion as to whether males are really better than females in all respects (Gresack & Frick et al., 2003; Guo et al., 2011), whether females are always better (Dalla et al., 2008; Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008; Voyer et al., 2007), whether there is actually no difference (Shors, 2002), or whether each of the two genders simply has strengths or weaknesses (Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008). The Experiment Now, based on the conclusions from the aforementioned studies, it remains inconclusive whether males or females are actually better than the other gender when it comes to memory and learning. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the majority of studies still prove that females are better than males not only in terms of the aspects of memory attributed to the female brain but when it comes to memory in general. Thus, our alternative hypothesis for this experiment is that “Females are better than males when it comes to memory tasks,” while the null hypothesis is that “There is no significant difference between females and males when it comes to memory tasks.” This experiment proposal is simply an attempt to find out whether it is really true that females are better than males in all aspects of memory, as proven by the results of the studies of Dalla et al., 2008; Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008; and Voyer et al., 2007. Moreover, this experiment is also a means to ascertain whether it is really true that women are better than men when it comes to object identity and object location (Voyer et al., 2007) and whether it is really true that men are better when it comes to working and reference memory (Gresack & Frick, 2003). Moreover, the study will also investigate whether, aside from gender, age is also really a significant factor when it comes to memory tasks. According to Herlitz and Rehnman (2008), it is not; while, according to Voyer et al. (2007), it is. Procedure. Twenty nouns will be highlighted in each of the 20 sentences to be shown to the participants at first, but after 10 minutes, the 20 nouns in the 20 sentences will be removed and the students will have to write the missing word for every sentence. This will measure verbal skills memory or working memory. The same number of students will receive a sheet with twenty pictures with a darkened or highlighted object in each picture, but after 10 minutes, the 20 highlighted parts of the 20 pictures are removed and the students will then have to guess the missing part from the choice of pictures. This will measure object location memory and object identity memory. Lastly, still the same number of students will be receiving 10 pictures of mazes with arrows, each from one of the 6 openings of the maze to another point among the 6. There are landmarks in every maze like a tree, a dog, a car, and so on, in order to facilitate familiarization. After 10 minutes of familiarizing with the 10 pictures of mazes, the students will then be given the same sheet of paper with the 10 pictures of mazes but they have to be the one to draw the direction of the arrow from one of the 6 openings to another one of the 6. This will measure spatial memory. For every category – verbal memory, object location memory, and spatial memory – the number of accurate answers of males will be compared against those of the female respondents. Moreover, the number of correct answers of young people will also be compared with the old. Statistical measures will then be applied. If the statistical results are significant for gender, then gender is indeed a factor in memory, and it will be checked whether men or women fared better. The same thing will be done to the age variable. Conclusion Regardless of the results of the proposed experiment, the preliminary research yielded almost a similar number of studies claiming that men are better than women in memory and learning, and studies claiming that women are better than men in this aspect of cognition. One implication of this in education and psychology is that perhaps the difference in memory is not based on gender but based on another variable like age and environment. Moreover, based on the findings of the aforementioned studies, perhaps the object being remembered as well as the presence of stress on the subject may affect memory more than gender would. The degree of being affected, however, and the way one utilizes the environment when doing memory tasks may depend on one’s gender. Further research is therefore needed in this area. References Dalla, C., Papachristos, E. B., Whetstone, A. S. & Shors, T. J. (2008). “Female rats learn trace memories better than male rats and consequently retain a greater proportion of new neurons in their hippocampi.” PNAS Early Edition, 1-6. Gresack, J. E. & Frick, K. M. (2003). “Male mice exhibit better spatial working and reference memory than females in a water-escape radial arm maze task.” Brain Research, 982, 98-107. Guo, R., Liang, N., Tai, F., Wu, R., Chang, G., He, F. & Yuan, Q. (2011). “Differences in Spatial Leaning and Memory for Male and Female Mandarin Voles (Microtus mandarinus) and BALB/c Mice.” Zoological Studies, 50(1), 24-30. Herlitz, A. & Rehnman, J. (2008). “Sex Differences in Episodic Memory.” Current Directions in Psychologica Science, 17(1), 52-56. Sex Differences in Memory: Women Better Than Men At Remembering Everyday Events. (2008). Retrieved from Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm Shors, T. J. (2002). “Opposite effects of stressful experience on memory formation in males versus females.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 4(2), 139-147. Voyer, D., Postma, A., Brake, B. & Imperato-McGinley, J. (2007). “Gender differences in object location memory: A meta-analysis.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(1), 23-38. Read More