New research has emerged that shows differences in men's vs. women's memories. These findings reinforce some of what we might have expected regarding which partner in a couple is going to be more likely to remember what the hostess looked like at the party and which one might be the better choice to find the way back home.In a very recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Herlitz and Rehnman (2008), these researchers report that women show better memory for verbal material and for faces (especially other women's) and men have better spatial memories (e.g., for routes and directions).

In one of the more clever studies discussed in this research, men and women were presented with faces designed to look androgynous and were told the faces were either male, female, or simply faces. While men showed the same recall ability in all three conditions, women showed superior recall in the condition in which they thought they were recalling other women's faces. It turns out that all infants, male or female, show an advantage for remembering female faces, but over time males lose this bias, while females retain it. Yet women still surpass men in recalling any type of face, suggesting a greater social orientation in general. Women also remember word lists better and events or incidents from the last year more effectively than men. In a classic study, Ross and Holmberg (1990) showed that women had much more detailed memories than their male partners for their first meetings. However, when these women left the room, their partners showed marked improvement in their memories for the same encounter, suggesting that they rely on their female mates to do the heavy lifting when it comes to remembering social events.

Why do men have better spatial memory and women better facial, social and verbal memory? Researchers have not yet been able to disentangle the biological vs. social contributions, yet studies across Asian, European and North American cultures have found similar results. No studies of sex differences in episodic memory in South America or Africa have been reported in the literature yet. The authors discuss Herlitz's study of illiterate Bangladeshi women who tend not to venture very much or very far outside their homes. In contrast to the typical findings, they showed poorer recall than the Bangladeshi men for several kinds of social information. Yet, they still showed superiority on an episodic memory task in which a list of words was presented orally and later recalled. So culture may make important differences, but certain advantages may be biologically hard-wired.

After writing all this, I wonder why I have a better memory for the names of actors and actresses in films than my wife does. And why she is always the one reading the map when we head out on a trip? It is good to remember that studies find results on average and not for every person. That's what I will tell her the next time she reminds me that I am the one who always gets us lost.