Student Research Report: Short-Term Memory- Battle of the Sexes
In Spring 2022, students in Dr. Emily Stark’s Research Methods and Design course completed multiple hands-on data collection projects. They were also assigned a blog paper where they discussed one of the topics they chose to research and explained their findings to a general audience. The goal of this assignment was to give students an opportunity to explore a different form of writing from APA-style research papers. Some of these blog papers will be featured here to showcase the students’ findings. Please feel free to contact Dr. Stark through the contact form on this site for additional information about this course or the assignments used.
By Ryanne Swalve-Matthies
Do you ever wonder how women can remember details of specific conversations, but men can’t seem to remember what they ate for dinner last night? The answer to your question is that women tend to have better long-term memory. Scientific studies done throughout the years have found that women tend to have better long-term memory than men, with Andrew Read writing in his blog that it’s due to the fact that women link emotion with events, which in turn allows them to better recall events (Read 2015). However, the same studies that have shown women have better long-term memory have also shown that men tend to have better short-term memory. In my Research Methods and Design class, we students were asked to design an experiment to answer a question we had. I was interested to see if this research about male and female short-term memory was true, so I designed an experiment to find answers. I termed it, the Battle of the Sexes.
To figure out how I wanted to put my experiment together I did a lot of research. My research brought me to the conclusion that the best way to find answers would be to have participants memorize pictures and words. This method has been used countless times and often produces the same results. A study conducted using college students found that pictures, and pictures with word labels, were much more easily remembered by participants than just words (Srivastava & Purohit, 1983). This is known as the Picture Superiority Effect, which basically states that pictures are the easiest for people to remember and often the first thing remembered.
I selected a series of twenty pictures and twenty words for my participants to view. Participants were asked to view either the pictures or the words for a total of fifteen seconds. Once their time was up, I asked them to immediately write down what they could recall seeing on a separate sheet of paper. Distractions were avoided by testing each participant in a quiet, private room. A total of eight participants completed my experiment, four of them male and four of them female, all of whom were between the ages of 18 and 22. This population was chosen because I have the most access to college-age students, considering that I am one. I also wanted all of my participants to be roughly the same age so differences in recollection were not caused by age differences. I had two males and two females view pictures, and the other two males and two females viewed words.
With this study, I believed or hypothesized, that men would have better short-term memory than women. I also believed that both males and females would be able to remember more pictures than words. I believed in these outcomes because my research told me that men tend to have better short-term memory than women and the Picture Superiority Effect explains that pictures tend to be the easiest for people to remember, not words.
After completing this experiment, I found my hypothesis to be somewhat accurate. Men and women remembered the same average number of words and the same average number of pictures. So, my experiment didn’t find any difference in short-term memory between males and females, as both genders had the same averages. The Battle of the Sexes ended in a tie. My experiment did, however, find a slight difference in the ability to remember pictures over words. Participants that viewed pictures were able to remember more of the pictures they saw than participants who viewed words. I believe this experiment perfectly captured the Picture Superiority Effect, but it did not capture the gender differences in short-term memory like those I had found in my research. I do believe, however, that with more participants this battle may have ended with different results, possibly even the results I had hypothesized.
My experiment may not have found significant differences in short-term memory for males and females, but it did find a slight difference in short-term memory for pictures and words. I believe studies like mine are extremely important and pretty easy to conduct. Not only can this study answer simple questions such as the one I came up with, but it can also answer more serious questions. Studies like this one could be used in Alzheimer’s research or could be used by researchers figuring out how to reach a certain audience through advertisements, It also has the potential to assist teachers in finding a more efficient way to teach. A researcher would most likely have to make a few changes to this study in order to receive the answers they need, but I believe a study such as this one can produce reliable data for important studies. There may not have been a victor in this Battle of the Sexes but with a few modifications, this experiment could one day produce a victor.
References
Read, Andrew. “Do Females Have Better Memory Than Males?” SiOWfa15: Science in Our World: Certainty and Controversy, 3 Dec. 2015, https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/12/03/do-females-have-better-memory-than-males/ . Accessed 18 Apr. 2022.
Srivastava, A. K., & Purohit, A. K. (1983). Short-term recognition memory for pictures and words: A dual coding interpretation. Psychologia: An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient, 26(4), 241-245. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/short-term-recognition-memory-pictures-words-dual/docview/617004477/se-2?accountid=12259 .