An article by Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Azriel Grysman appears in the March issue of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. “Gender Differences in Episodic Encoding of Autobiographical Memory” is based on Grysman’s work with Hamilton students.
In his study, Grysman tested whether women retain more information over time than men or whether they simply store more information to begin with. He asked participants to report two events within a day of their occurrence. He again asked them to report on the same events two to three months later.
Grysman found that women reported more details of the events in their initial reports than did the men. In later reports, he found that the amount of detail reported decreased at similar rates for both women and men.
Grysman said these results suggest that women store more of this type of information than men and that how information is first taken in may be more central to understanding gender differences in memory, compared to processes involved in forgetting.
