An investigation of sex differences on incidental memory for verbal and pictorial material

doi:10.1016/S1041-6080(99)80122-8

Learning and Individual Differences

Volume 10, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 259-272

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1041-6080(99)80122-8 Get rights and content

Abstract

Previous research has sometimes claimed a female advantage on tasks of incidental memory. However, it is uncertain whether the sex difference was due to the incidental, or to the heavily verbal, nature of the tasks used, since women are known to have better verbal memory than men. The current study asked whether a female superiority would be found under less verbally-loaded conditions. No sex difference was found on two different pictorial tasks, both of which measured incidental memory for the content of complex scenes. In contrast, a female advantage was observed across both incidental and intentional conditions when easily labeled stimuli were used. This advantage was eliminated on the incidental condition when the effects of intentional verbal memory were controlled for. These findings strongly suggest that previous reports of a female advantage on incidental memory may have been due to the choice of verbalizable stimuli.

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Presumably, this measuring system is more effective in males than in females, and results in an early detection of structural changes of objects. In turn, in the object-constructive task, females are more efficient when using the working memory component [4,10]. In summary, we have found out the gender-related differences at the early stage of visuo-spatial processing and a remarkable sensitivity of the parietal P1 peak amplitude in males only to the object structure changes, namely to the rotation of object details.
The gender differences in accuracy, reaction time (RT) and amplitude of the early P1 and N1 components of ERPs during recognition of previously memorized objects after their spatial transformation were examined. We used three levels of the spatial transformation: a displacement of object details in radial direction, and a displacement in combination with rotation of the details by ±0° to 45° and ±45° to 90°. The accuracy and the RT data showed a similarity of task performance in males and females. The effect of rotation was significantly greater than the effect of simple displacement, and the accuracy decreased, and the RT increased with the rotation angle in both genders. At the same time we found significant sex differences in the early stage of visual processing. In males the P1 peak amplitude at the P3/P4 sites increased significantly during the recognition of spatially transformed objects, and the wider the angle of rotation the greater the P1 peak amplitude. In contrast, in females the P1 peak amplitude did not depend on the rotation of figure details. The N1 amplitude revealed no gender differences, although the object transformation evoked somewhat greater changes in the N1 at the O1/O2 sites in females compared to males. This new fact that only males demonstrated the sensitivity of early perceptual stage to the transformation of objects adds information about the neurobiological basis of different strategies in the visual processing used by each gender.
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Research on sex differences in episodic memory is extensive, and where differences have been found, they indicate that women show an advantage in verbal memory, memory for object locations, and face recognition [1–3,7], whereas men show an advantage in visuospatial memory. Verbal memory tasks on which women excel include word recall and recognition [4–6], object recall [7], and story recall [8]. Although it has been hypothesized that this sex difference may be due to the female advantage in verbal abilities, rather than to a true advantage in verbal episodic memory [9], it has been demonstrated that the effect for verbal memory is obtained even when verbal ability is statistically controlled [10].
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Furthermore, a large number of behavioral studies found better verbal memory in women than in men (for a review see Kimura, 1999). Interestingly, the female memory advantage appears to be specific to intentional stimulus encoding, but does not show up if men and women are tested for incidental encoding (Chipman and Kimura, 1998). In line with the present results, this suggests that maintenance of attentional focus on the primary task is driving the observed sex effects.
Prior research revealed sex differences in the processing of unattended changes in speaker prosody. The present study aimed at investigating the role of estrogen in mediating these effects. To this end, the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants watched a silent movie with subtitles and passively listened to a syllable sequence that contained occasional changes in speaker prosody. In one block, these changes were neutral, whereas in another block they were emotional. Estrogen values were obtained for each participant and correlated with the mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitude elicited in the EEG. As predicted, female listeners had higher estrogen values than male listeners and showed reduced MMN amplitudes to neutral as compared to emotional change in speaker prosody. Moreover, in both, male and female listeners, MMN amplitudes were negatively correlated with estrogen when the change in speaker prosody was neutral, but not when it was emotional. This suggests that estrogen is associated with reduced distractibility by neutral, but not emotional, events. Emotional events are spared from this reduction in distractibility and more likely to penetrate voluntary attention directed elsewhere. Taken together, the present findings provide evidence for a role of estrogen in human cognition and emotion.
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Object–location memory is the only spatial task where female subjects have been shown to outperform males. This result is not consistent across all studies, and may be due to the combination of the multi-component structure of object location memory with the conditions under which different studies were done. Possible gender differences in object location memory and its component object identity memory were assessed in the present study. In order to disentangle these two components, an object location memory task (in which objects had to be relocated in daily environments), and a separate object identity recognition task were carried out. This study also focused on the conditions under which object locations were encoded and retrieved. Only half of the participants were aware of the fact that object locations had to be retrieved later on. Moreover, by applying the ‘process dissociation procedure’ to the object location memory assessments and the ‘remember-know’ paradigm to the object identity measure, the amount of explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) retrieval was estimated for each component. In general, females performed better than males on the object location memory task. However, when controlled for object identity memory, females no longer outperformed males, whereas they did not obtain a higher general object identity memory score, nor did they have more explicit or implicit recollection of the object identities. These complicated effects might stem from a difference between males and females, in the way locations or associations between objects and locations are retrieved. In general, participants had more explicit (conscious) recollection than implicit (unconscious) recollection. No effect of encoding context was found, nor any interaction effect of gender, encoding and retrieval context.
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This paper reports two experiments conducted to examine priority effects and sex differences in object location memory. A new task of paired position-learning was designed, based on the A–B A–C paradigm, which was used in paired word learning. There were three different paired position-learning conditions: (1) positions of several different objects (B-objects and C-objects) around referent objects (A-objects) were learned in the A–B A–C position-learning condition, (2) positions of several different objects with no referent objects were learned in the 0–B 0–C position-learning condition, and (3) positions of identical objects (stars) with no referent objects were learned in the 0-star 0-star position-only condition. The results revealed a significant priority effect on performance in the A–B A–C and the 0–B 0–C position-learning conditions but not in the 0-star 0-star position-only condition. Contradictory results were obtained with respect to the sex variable: a female superiority effect on paired position learning was significant in Experiment 1, but this effect was not replicated in Experiment 2. In addition, an articulatory suppression task used in Experiment 2 had a significant effect on recall of different object positions but no effect on recall of identical object positions. This suggested that verbal encoding was not necessary for learning of positions of identical objects.

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An investigation of sex differences on incidental memory for verbal and pictorial material

Abstract

Ethology and Sociobiology

Personality and Individual Differences

Neuropsychologia

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Personality and Individual Differences

Neuropsychologia

Evolution and Human Behavior

Learning and Individual Differences

Personality and Individual Differences

Journal of Research in Personality

Images of London

Role of the hippocampus in sex differences in verbal memory: Memory outcome following left anterior temporal lobectomy

Neuropsychology

Cross-cultural comparison of sexrelated differences on intelligence tests: A meta-analysis

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

The California Verbal Learning Test

Kit of factor-referenced cognitive tests

Imagery and sex differences in incidental recall

British Journal of Psychology