Are All Memories Alike? Gender/Cultural Differences

Sex Differences In Memory: Women Better Than Men At Remembering Everyday Events

There have always been a difference between men and women , beginning  with the physical part ending with the mental part . Scientists from Sweden proved that the differences between men and women or sex differences have todo a lot with episodic memory , and have proven that women are better in episodic memory . First women are better in episodic memory tasks like remembering word , pictures about things . Like if a couple would get lost , the men would remember how to escape and the women where she left the keys or were is there cellphone . Men are better at remembering symbolic non-linguistic things.


Women can remember facial features better , like in a test were various faces were given to females , they had to recall the faces . The results show that in between the female,male, or just faces options the women pointed more in the female faces . This shows that women can identify better female faces than rather males.  Women can do better the task of recognizing familiar odors , than man . A variable that affects this sex differences can be education .


The results say that female are better at episodic memory , at specific events . The probability of genetically based memories between male and female are not known still .

The culture of memory

Kids when are little , might have 2 to 4 years when they don't really remember about the events that happened . This situation is called childhood amnesia . Researchers had discovered various ways that kids remember events since childhood  between different cultures all over the world . 

The difference between cultures , like with american children and asian children .People who grew up in societies that focus more on personal history, like the US, will have earlier childhood memories than those people who grew up in an environment whose value interdependence is placed above those of personal history, like Asia.

An important model called the social-interaction model meant that our autobiographical memories don't develop just away , but we develop them when we are children and recall them with adults over again , enabling us to remember with more detail.

There an abundant of experiments explaining this cultural differences affecting memory . Some are studying Chinese-American immigrants to see how their early childhood memories compare with those of native Chinese and native Americans.  Here is the scientist Leitchman explaining its findings  "Right now we're really refining it and working out the wide variety of mechanisms that cause it."


Sites:

http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.aspx

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm