Memory & Alzheimer's Disease

Gender Differences: 

Psychologists estimated that women with Alzheimer's disease show worse mental deterioration than men with this disease. It mostly affects women's verbal skills. Psychologists explain it as it is due to a hormonal influence. The reason why women have worse mental deterioration than men is because of women's loss of estrogen. Men are more lucky in this case, because they have a greater cognitive reserve which provides protection against the disease process. 

Another difference between male and female gender is that women are better at remembering faces, especially female faces. The reason is that women focus more on female faces than on male faces. In my opinion it's because of the competition. Women also excell in verbal episody memory tasks that include remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperform women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing.

Cultural Differences: 

"Childhood amnesia" is an inability to remember our earliest childhood memories. Believe or not, but our culture shapes how we remember our past and from what year we have our first childhood memory. The way parents discuss the events in children's lives influences the way the children will later remember those memories. People who grow up in a society which focuses on an individual personal history  (U.S) or on a family history (Maori) have earlier childhood memories than people who come from culture that values interdependence. (Asian cultures) 

Angela Gutchess, assistant professor of psychology has evidence that Western cultures  focus more on objects and categories, ­whereas people who come  Eastern cultures focus more on contextual details and similarities and they sort it by functional relationships. For example: Western cultures pair a squirrel with another similar animal (because they are both animals), but Eastern cultures pair a squirrel with a nut, because squirrels eat nuts.