Sex differences in memory performance for odors, tone sequences and colors

Sense of olfaction would seem to be of little importance for human behavior. However, a closer look at this from the psychological point of view reveals many interesting aspects, such as sex differences in olfactory perception, that are of interest to differential psychology. The present study deals with sex differences in the memory for odors; we assume that women will do better here than men while other memory tasks involving acoustical and optical stimuli will show no such differences. Sixty women and 40 men were examined. On the first day, they had to retain 10 odors, 10 random-generated tone-sequences, and 10 colors. On the second day, 20 such stimuli for each memory task were presented, and the subjects had to remember and to tell which were known and which of them were unknown stimuli to them. A significant advantage in the olfaction memory task was found for women, while acoustical and optical memory scores showed no such differences. This expected finding is discussed in two ways. First, the female advantage might result from phylogenetic sources. Second, it might arise because women in general more often than men seem to deal with olfactory cues, so that they might simply have more experience and therefore the greater chance to score higher in an odor memory task.