Children started building their memory skills as early as age two, although as adults they won’t recall much before their third or fourth birthday. Simple gender constructs show girls tend to remember more from their childhood than boys because of the way mothers speak to their daughters compared to their sons.
Mothers communicate differently between their children at no real fault of their own. Daughters are encouraged to share their emotions while sons are told what to do with those emotions, according to the Science of Us. The maternal figures also asks for more informational details about their child’s day, and girls will add more emotional elements to their accounts that will help them build stronger memories.
The addition to more emotions, the other people involved and the meaningfulness of the memory also contribute to women’s ability to better recall these early events, according to a 2013 study by Azriel Grysman, a psychologist at Hamilton College.
“The message that girls are getting is that talking about your feelings is part of describing an event,” Grysman, who studies gender differences and memory, told Science of Us. “And for boys, emotions are something to be concerned with when they are part of a larger issue, but otherwise not. And it’s quite possible, over time, that those tendencies will help women establish more connections in their brains of different pieces of an event, which will lead to better memory long-term.”
Elaborations can open up different paths to bringing back a memory, such as what a person sensed whether through internal feelings, smelled in the air, or tasted in their mouth. Researchers call these “retrieval cues,” where people associate a memory with another sensory clue, according to Science of Us.
Another 2000 study found early memory recall isn’t tied entirely to gender differences. The culture in which a person grows up can also play a role, as well as how much parents share with their children about past experiences.
“The social construction of autobiographical memory begins in childhood and takes place, at least in part, in the context of parent-child conversation from the past,” said the study’s lead researchers Harlene Hayne and Shelley MacDonald of the University of Otago in New Zealand.
