If the man in your life can never remember the plot of the slushy film you watched last night, it may not be because he wasn’t paying attention.
In fact it may be out of his control altogether.
Researchers have found so-called gender conditioning affects how easy we find a film to follow, and how much we can absorb.
It means that because boys are directed from early childhood to be interested in things like cars, weapons and fighting styles, they excel at recalling details of action films because the content ‘matches’ their gender.
Meanwhile because girls are generally expected to be emotional, gentle and understanding, they have a better memory for romantic comedies.
In the study for the British Psychological Society, German researchers showed 160 men and women 30-minute clips from the Hugh Grant rom-com Notting Hill and Bruce Willis thriller Die Hard with a Vengeance. The experiment was then repeated with the French romance Amelie and action film Payoff.
Afterwards, the viewers were given a surprise test including questions on characters’ names, eye colour, plot details and locations. The men remembered more details of the action movies, while the women did better on the romances.
But the findings could not be explained by the volunteers being more familiar with some of the films than others, or because they paid more attention to one genre. How much a participant liked a film wasn’t linked to how much of it they remembered either, said the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Instead, the researchers, from the Technical University of Dortmund, say the answer may be that ‘our minds are conditioned in a gendered way to process different kinds of story differently?...?and remember personally relevant information more easily.’
Daily Mail