Researchers have suggested that men forget more than women.
Professor Jostein Holmen , from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, said that it was surprising to see that men forget more than women.
He said that it was also surprising to see that men are just as forgetful whether they are 30 or 60 years old, asserting that the results were unambiguous.
Holmen and his co-workers asked nine questions about how well people think they remember as a part of a large longitudinal population health study conducted in mid-Norway called HUNT3.
The participants were asked how often they had problems remembering things, whether they had problems with remembering names and dates, if they could remember what they did one year ago and if they were able to remember details from conversations. Men reported the most problems for eight out of nine questions.
Women have the same problems with remembering as men do, but to a lesser extent. Names and dates are also hardest to remember for women.
These problems accelerate with age, but to a much lesser extent than the researchers believed before. Women forget just as much whether they are 30 or 50 years old.
The results have been published in BMC Psychology.
