Sex differences in verbal working memory: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

The present meta-analysis aimed to quantify sex differences in verbal working memory and to examine potential moderators of these differences. We examined 802 effect sizes from 478 samples in 284 studies in a multilevel meta-analysis. Results revealed a small overall female advantage (g = .028, 95% CI [.006, .050]). In the overall sample, results showed that sex differences differed across tasks. Specifically, the female advantage was significant for cued tasks (g = .079, 95% CI [.030, .128]) and Free Recall tasks (g = .145, 95% CI [.102, .188]) whereas there was a male advantage on Complex Span (g = -.042, 95% CI [-.083, -.002]), and no sex differences on Serial Recall (g = .003, 95% CI [-.055, .050]), and Simple Span tasks (g < .001, 95% CI [-.034, .033]). Within each task, we found that recall direction, stimulus type, presentation format, response format, and age accounted for significant variance in at least 1 of the tasks. Analyses provided no evidence of a publication bias, although the female advantage varied as a function of sample source, whether the title made reference to sex, and whether authors had to be contacted to obtain relevant data. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for sex differences in episodic memory and in the context of clinical applications and theory building. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Dissociating visuo-spatial and verbal working memory: It's all in the features.

Echoing many of the themes of the seminal work of Atkinson and Shiffrin (The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 2; 89-195, 1968), this paper uses the feature model (Nairne, Memory & Cognition, 16, 343-352, 1988; Nairne, Memory & Cognition, 18; 251-269, 1990; Neath & Nairne, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2; 429-441, 1995) to account for performance in working-memory tasks. The Brooks verbal and visuo-spatial matrix tasks were performed alone, with articulatory suppression, or with a spatial suppression task; the results produced the expected dissociation. We used approximate Bayesian computation techniques to fit the feature model to the data and showed that the similarity-based interference process implemented in the model accounted for the data patterns well. We then fit the model to data from Guérard and Tremblay (2008, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 556-569); the latter study produced a double dissociation while calling upon more typical order reconstruction tasks. Again, the model performed well. The findings show that a double dissociation can be modelled without appealing to separate systems for verbal and visuo-spatial processing. The latter findings are significant as the feature model had not been used to model this type of dissociation before; importantly, this is also the first time the model is quantitatively fit to data. For the demonstration provided here, modularity was unnecessary if two assumptions were made: (1) the main difference between spatial and verbal working-memory tasks is the features that are encoded; (2) secondary tasks selectively interfere with primary tasks to the extent that both tasks involve similar features. It is argued that a feature-based view is more parsimonious (see Morey, 2018, Psychological Bulletin, 144, 849-883) and offers flexibility in accounting for multiple benchmark effects in the field.