An investigation of sex differences on incidental memory for verbal and pictorial material

Previous research has sometimes claimed a female advantage on tasks of incidental memory. However, it is uncertain whether the sex difference was due to the incidental, or to the heavily verbal, nature of the tasks used, since women are known to have better verbal memory than men. The current study asked whether a female superiority would be found under less verbally-loaded conditions. No sex difference was found on two different pictorial tasks, both of which measured incidental memory for the content of complex scenes. In contrast, a female advantage was observed across both incidental and intentional conditions when easily labeled stimuli were used. This advantage was eliminated on the incidental condition when the effects of intentional verbal memory were controlled for. These findings strongly suggest that previous reports of a female advantage on incidental memory may have been due to the choice of verbalizable stimuli.