MEMORY

There is an idea that women can remeber things better than men, and this is being discussed in the first article. Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Stockholm, Sweden, found out that significant sex differences in episodic memory, were women can remember better past memories in a long-term. The results state that women were able to remeber verbal stuf better such as: remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events but men were able to do better than women at remebering remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information. But, there are some sex differences that indicate that women can remember better things that are verbal and visuospacial. Also, women are better at remembering and recognizing the faces of women, more than those of men because they pay better attention to them. "To determine this particular finding, the psychologists presented three groups of participants with black and white pictures of hairless, androgynous faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The findings indicate that women were able to remember the androgynous faces presented as female more accurately than the androgynous faces presented as male." The fact that women remeber things better than men can be deducted from the educational differences.

The second article talks about how researchers are discovering that our culture helps shape how we remember our past--and how far back our memory stretches. Researchers believe that humans have what Freud called "childhood amnesia" because they cannot remember any event before certain age. What is interesting is that the time in which this effect ended in each person changes throughout each culture. For example, for some poeple it might have ended at the age of 4, but for others it was at their 2.5 years. They believe that people who grow up in a society that focuses on individual personal history and on personal family history will vary in their memory abilities. The study conducted on the caucasians and the Asians, clearly demonstartes how the memories varied from each culture. They also found out how mothers also influence on the memory of each child. There are some moms who elaborate more on talking about certain past events to their child's but others simply ask closed questions and don't ask about past events. "To many Americans, she says, this lack of interest in ones own or others' personal pasts violates what we think of as a truism--that the fundamental thing that makes us who we are is our personal memories." Many cultures believed that personal memorie's are not important and simply don't try to remember them.
Overall, Leichtman says, "It's not yet an old idea" that culture influences memory. "Right now we're really refining it and working out the wide variety of mechanisms that cause it."

http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.aspx
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm