Reasons women have more retentive memory than men

Findings by some researchers have shown that women have better retentive memory than men.

Reasons women remember things more than men:

1.    Women pay more attention to happenings and are able to recall such when needed.

2.    It is due to hormones or brain structure. (The brain’s memory hub shrinks when they are between 20 and 40 years old, unlike in women).

3.    Care-taking role often assumed by women and more responsibilities at home boost their memory.

4.    Parents demanding more details from girls than boys at that early age contributes to this.

Reasons culled from these analysis below:

In a study by Prof. Qi Wang, an expert in human development at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, New York, United States, it was found that gender has a role to play in how people remember things.

In the course of the study, which involved 60 college undergraduates, she sent three text messages to them in one week, and instructed them to write down what had happened to them during the previous 30 minutes. Thus, once they received the text, they should quickly type their experience within the last 30 minutes and forward to her for documentation.

At the end of the week, she asked all of them to describe in detail those events they wrote about in the text messages. She titled the study ‘Gender and Emotion in Everyday Event Memory.’

According to the result of the exercise, which was posted on the institution’s website, the researcher found that the women in the study wrote more detailed piece on their past 30 minutes experience in the text message they sent. And beyond that, they were able to recall more details about what they sent via the text message than men after one week.

Wang ascribed the difference to the fact that women pay more attention to happenings and are able to recall such when needed.

Wang said, “It appears that, compared with men, women may attend to and encode more information during ongoing events, experience similar rates of forgetting, and then show greater ability to access retained event information at recall.

In another study by Dr. Liana Palermo, a researcher at Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom, it was equally discovered that women are better at remembering things than men, which he ascribed to the fact that women develop the ability when they juggle responsibilities at home with their career and that it may be due to hormones or brain structure. He said men helping in the home could boost their memory.

He involved 100 men and women, aged between 15 and 40 in a task that puts them through a series of memory tests. And at the end of the study, it was concluded that even though both men and women find it hard to remember things as they age, women are still better at remembering things.

He also points to the fact that previous research has shown that in men, the brain’s memory hub shrinks when they are between 20 and 40 years old, unlike in women.

In the study published on Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology and reviewed on Daily Mail, he said, “An alternative hypothesis is that the sex differences we found could be due to the care-taking role often assumed by women and the fact that in addition to work responsibilities, women also have more responsibilities at home.

“This means that the skill needed to balance running a home and bringing up children with holding down a job improves prospective memory.

“A real life example of this would be, in a family, you would expect the woman to be the one to remember to buy some milk after work. Or she will remember to give a book back to a friend when she sees him next. She will be better at all of these kinds of tasks than a man.

“As a consequence of this social role, in daily life women might perform tasks involving prospective memory more than men, enhancing their performance in remembering to remember. If this is the case, one way for men to improve their memory would be to help more around the home.

Meanwhile, an expert in gender and memory at Hamilton College, New Zealand, Azriel Grysman, said women having better memory could be traced to when they were young, when parents often demand details of their experiences.

According to Grysman, demanding more details from girls than boys at that early age is indirectly training them to take note of details and remember them when asked.

“Kids whose mothers asked them to elaborate more when they were young had better recall as adults, and gender norms orient girls more toward elaboration than boys, which may lead to better memories,” she said.

Explaining further in a piece on New York Magazine, she said, “A memory is a pattern of mental activity, and the more entry points we have to what that pattern might be, the more chances we have to retrieve it. Since girls are more likely to be trained to elaborate and include their feelings in their memory-making, they are more likely to remember better.

“It’s quite possible, over time, that those tendencies will help women establish more connections of different pieces of an event in their brains, which will lead to better memory long-term.”

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