ABSTRACT

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN VERBAL WORKING MEMORY

Fliani Tie Ling Li

Bachelor of Science with Honours
(Cognitive Science)
2012

This study was performed to study gender differences in verbal working memory which involved
32 participants from the Faculty of Cognitive Sciences and Human Development in University
Malaysia Sarawak. Verbal working memory is defined as those aspects of world knowledge,
language competence and verbal processing used to achieve a particular goal. Specifically, its
goal was to examine gender differences not only in verbal working memory performance but
also gender differences in short words and long words that they can remember. Normally, female
performs better than male in the verbal working memory. However, after the two experiments
that had been conducted, findings showed the contrary result. Word List Recall Task was used to
measure the significance level for the first objective and it showed that there was no significant
difference between genders in working memory performance. For the second objective, the result
also showed there was no significant difference between genders in remembering short words
and long words in the Word Length Effect Task. To sum up, the different findings were occurred
due to the participants variety in memorization technique and environmental factor. As a
consequence, such factors should not be ignored as each individual was exclusive from each
other especially on physical and cognitive perspective.