The objective of this experiment is to investigate whether the gender of an individual has an effect on one’s ability to recall short-term information. The experiment will involve 40 participants observing 18 objects for two minutes after which they will be required to list down the list of the items that they can recall. The results will then be analyzed to reach a conclusion on the impact that gender has on the short-term memory.
Hypothesis
The female participants have a higher short-term memory than the male participants.
Background
Memory
Memory is defined as a cognitive process that involves processing of the information in the human brain. The brain is capable of working to constructively encode, store and retrieve the information thus enabling memory ( Donahue et al., 2015). The human brain receives information through the five senses which include sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. The brain is then capable of processing the information it receives by attaching meaning to this information and make the association with the ideas and the concepts that have already been stored in the brain.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
There are three stages of human memory, which include the sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sensory memory is the process whereby the brain sorts out a large number of stimuli received and decides which information needs much attention. Short term memory, on the other hand, refers to the ability of the memory system to store information for a limited amount of time, either just for minutes of a few hours ( Warrington , 2014). It is the ability of the memory system to be able to store and recall the information that has processed a few minutes or a few hours ago. Long-term memory, on the other hand, deals with the storage of information for a very long-term or even permanently into the memory system ( Rutherford et al., 2012).
Materials
The following materials will be required for the experiment:
20 male participants who are aged between 20-30 years old
20 female participants who are aged between 20-30 years old
20 objects which include items like apple, ball, clock, oranges, cup, banana, chair, pen, radio, book, television, mango, knife, spoon, umbrella, etc.
A stopwatch
36 pieces of paper and pencils
A classroom with seats and a curtain
Procedure
In this experiment, the independent variable is the male and female participants. The dependent variable is the recalling ability of the male and female participants; by recalling and writing down what they can remember. There are also the constants or the control variables which in this case are the number of objects, types of objects and the time given for the participants to write down the list of objects they can recall.
The procedure starts with arranging the 20 objects in front of the classroom. Put a curtain to hide the object from the participants before the experiment starts and after it ends. Bring all the 40 participants into the room and set a stopwatch. Allow the participants to look at the twenty objects for one minute and then pull the curtain to close the objects again. Instruct the participants to write on the paper their names and gender then list the objects they have observed. Allow them up to five minutes for recalling what they observed. Take the papers; check the lists written by all participants against their gender and tally.
Observation
In the experiment, the female participants were observed to have a slightly higher short-term memory compared to the male participants. The results are summarized in the table below.
Table 1
Gender Percentage of correct items recalled from the short-term memory
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Female 66 68 82 62 58 72 50 72 50 78 68 56 70 88 42 60 56 62 70 56
Male 56 54 66 54 62 44 78 60 80 66 42 52 60 70 66 48 64 62 66 76
The table above shows the results of the experimental research with the percentage of the correct items remembered from the short-term memory. In most of the objects, female seem to have high short-term memory compared to the male participants although in certain items such as items number 7 and number 15 where the male participants seem to have higher recall rate than the female. The average percentage short-term memory rate for the female participants is 64.3% while that of the male participants is 61.3%. There is a 3% gap between the percentage short-term memory for female and male participants. The female participants, therefore, have a slightly higher short-term memory as compared to the male participants based on the results of the experiment.
Conclusion
The data analyzed from the experiment shows support for the hypothesis that female participants have the high short-term memory than the male participants. Gender, therefore, have a role in the short-term memory of an individual based on the above-described experiment. The female tends to have a slightly higher short-term memory compared to the male peers. Some people are more gifted in retaining and recalling the information than others. The special memory skills of some of these people are given by nature, and that could explain the reason why female have a higher short-term memory than the male. However, some memory skills can be nurtured and developed using various techniques which will result in improved memory skills.
References
Donahue, J., Anne Hendricks, L., Guadarrama, S., Rohrbach, M., Venugopalan, S., Saenko, K., & Darrell, T. (2015). Long-term recurrent convolutional networks for visual recognition and description. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 2625-2634).
Rutherford, A., Markopoulos, G., Bruno, D., & Brady-Van den Bos, M. (2012). LONG-TERM MEMORY. Cognitive psychology , 229.
Warrington, E. K. (2014). The double dissociation of short-and long-term memory. Human Memory and Amnesia (PLE: Memory) , 4 , 61.
