Female Test Takers Outperform Men at Every Age on a Verbal Memory Task.

We are a group of scientists who study how the brain works in healthy people so that we can better understand brain disease. Do you have ten minutes to participate in our study and help the cause? We are using crowd-sourcing to study how the brain works with a simple ten minute memory game. Come and join our scientific research study at www.mindcrowd.org and be part of our fight against Alzheimer's and other brain diseases. Your healthy brain can help us understand what goes wrong during disease! After you complete the test you can see your results and compare yourself against other test takers. This figure shows an association between sex and memory performance on a so-called paired associates learning task that was developed in 1894. The data shown here are derived from approximately 25,000 test takers of ages 18 and up. We are showing two Loess curves – one for women test takers (green) and one for men (red). The x-axis is Age in years and the y-axis is performance in total word pairs correct (with 36 being a perfect score). The gif illustrates over 2 years of data in 15 seconds. Note how the effect of sex is largest above 50 years of age and this effect is immediately noticeable but to tease apart the sex effect in the young ages requires almost the entire 2 years of study time. With time you can see the shaded confidence intervals shrinking dramatically as we recruit more and more test takers. This is an actual scientific study. We are actual scientists. The study is approved by an academic regulatory review board (or IRB). Please help us keep the integrity of our work high by only taking the test once and by not posting the word pairs here in the comments section. Thanks. NOTE FOR THE SCIENCE GEEKS - our memory task is a verbal paired associates learning paradigm. It tests a form of memory known as episodic memory. We didn’t create the task for this work. It is a long-used, time-tested task that was developed by Mary Whiton Calkins in 1894. The difference between sexes is significant at every single age. The p-value for this difference is 1.72 x 10-114 and the effect size is 2.26 words. The graph was made in R/ggplot2, the lines are Loess fit with 95% shaded confidence intervals. Overlaid on the Loess lines is an indication of the mean (the filled circles) and the standard error of the mean (SEM, the lines with whiskers). The statistical analysis was performed using a multiple linear regression model that incorporated all of our other measured demographic and lifestyle variables (approximately 25 different other co-variates). Take the test here: www.mindcrowd.org