Gender Superiority On Semantic Versus Imagery Stimuli on Memory

Influences on Memory Stimuli towards GenderMemory and recall are critical to learning. Of equal importance is its role in furthering the development of the individual. Do you have the ability to use the full capacity of your memory? In psychology, the basic definition of memory is an individual’s capability to store, hold and retrieve information. Short term memory is sometimes referred to as “working” or “active” memory, and is said to hold a small amount of information. It can also be described as the capacity for holding in mind, in an active, highly available state, a small amount of information. One of the most important tasks of memory is used by our brain to learn, store and use information.

When considering factors that might lead an individual to learn, store and use information more efficiently than others, several studies have looked into gender and type of information being remembered; such as semantic text and pictorial imagery. Visualization is how people begin to perceive reality. Our capability to both visualize and conceptualize tends to define how we approach life, how we learn, how we stay on task, how we integrate information and most importantly, how we communicate with others.

Differences in memory processing between words and nonlinguistic stimuli have received much attention in experiments and studies. Which do you think has a better retention? An experiment conducted by Lauren Seifert in 1997 looked at size relativity of categorized words and pictures and proposed that “pictures have privileged access to semantic memory” (Seifert, 1997). In a similar study by Stephen Dewhurst who looked at high and low imageability words versus pictures found, “a picture superiority effect was found…overall recognition performance was significantly higher for pictures than for words” (Dewhurst, 1994). More interestingly, these perceived memories most often had more sensory–perceptual and contextual...