2008 Volume 13 Issue 3 Pages 135-142
This study aimed to examine the effects of gender differences on working memory by examining changes over time during task execution. The subjects were 12 female and 12 male students. Computer-based tasks formulated by the authors, using the working memory that actively retains information as the index, were used for experiments of 60 minutes on three groups: females during the follicular phase, females during the luteal phase, and males. The results showed that performance of working memory tasks was significantly higher in the luteal phase, when sex hormones are secreted at high density, compared with the male students. Furthermore, for task execution, the results indicated that mental workload was lower for males than for females in either phase, in terms of subjective evaluation. However, physiological evaluation showed that mental strain tended to be higher before task execution. During task execution, cardiac sympathetic nerve activity was in an ascendant state for all subjects.
