• The differences in gender are obvious to even the least observant person, and researchers have looked at the impact those differences can have on something as common as memory. Three separate studies, each looking at memory in three methods, reported different results. Two studies showed that women had better memory recall than men, but a third study was not able to determine any discernible difference.
  
  

Traumatic Brain Injury

• The results of a study by Jacobus Donders, Ph.D., and Helen Woodward, Ph.D., that appeared in the March/April 2003 issue of "The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation" looked at the effect that gender had on pediatric patients who were rehabilitating a brain that had suffered a traumatic injury. In a study of 70 patients with brain injuries and a control group of 70 demographically matched pediatrics, the researchers discovered that female patients outperformed the male counterparts on the composite T score of the California Verbal Learning Test: Children's Version. However, the control group--which consisted of children who had not experienced traumatic brain injuries--did not show any significant difference in performance based on gender.
  
  

Episodic Memory

• A 2006 Syracuse University Department of Psychology study compared the performances of men and women in episodic memory. In looking at recollection and familiarity, they determined that women could recall more pictures than men but there was no difference between the groups in familiarity. Syracuse discovered in its study that women had better recall than men when learning contextually unrelated pairs of words, but there performance on contextually related pairs was equal for both genders. However, men did make fewer associative errors when responding to contextually related cues than the women in the study. The researchers determined that women possessed a better item-to-context binding than men. Other studies referred to in the study pointed out that women performed better than men in paired-associate learning and both immediate and delayed free recall, and women recalled a greater number of words after learning a list than men did. Additionally research revealed that women performed better in recognition studies of words, odors and faces. The underlying root cause of the differences in gender performances was not discussed.
  
  

Effects of Stress on Memory

• A study in the "Behavior Neuroscience" journal in 2006 looked at the effect that psycho-social stress would have on a group of 157 college students using a short film to compare verbal and visual memory. Researchers Victoria Beckner, David Tucker, and Yvon Delville at the University of Texas at Austin and David Mohr of the University of California at San Francisco determined that stress assisted in the consolidation of memory and did not weaken memory retrieval. The analysis did not reveal any effect of gender recall performance.