Sex and Cultural Differences In Memory

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

Sex differences in memory:

          There has always been differences between sexes, and their capacity of memory is one two.  The findings of psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Sweden did determine that sex differences have a lot to do with their episodic memory, a long-term memory build on personal experiences, by which give woman an advantage.
          The differences between the sexes is that women are better in verbal episodic memory taks (ex: remembering words, objects, pictures) and men are better at remembering symbolic non-linguistic things. Another case is that women can remember facial feature better than men, especially those of other females. Also that women recognize familiar smells better. But another thing that affects this is education, which have a big influence on these sex differences.
          Althought the chances that genetically-based differences between the capacity of male and female memory is not clear, results from experiments show that females have the advantage to episodic memory.


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

Cultural differences in memory:
         

           Throughout a child's life, it is normal for the child not to remember events that happened below the age of 4 or so. This is called "childhood amnesia". But researcher now have discovered the fact that between different cultures, the time when a child can actually remember something is very different, the largest difference up to 2 years apart.
           The main difference that could be found was between 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.
           These difference are also explained by the social-interaction model developed by Katherine Nelson. This models says, our autobiographical memories don't develop in a vacuum, but when we were children and we go over past events with adults, enabling us to remember more details.
          There have been many experiments done to understand these slight differences more. Like they tried to compare the earliest memories of Asian-American immigrants to those of native asians and americans and try to figure out a pattern. So overall, this is not a really precise theory, but they are working on it to prove that it is.