Her voice lingers on and her memory is strategic: effects of gender on directed forgetting.

ABSTRACT: The literature on directed forgetting has employed exclusively visual words. Thus, the potentially interesting aspects of a spoken utterance, which include not only vocal cues (e.g., prosody) but also the speaker and the listener, have been neglected. This study demonstrates that prosody alone does not influence directed-forgetting effects, while the sex of the speaker and the listener significantly modulate directed-forgetting effects for spoken utterances. Specifically, forgetting costs were attenuated for female-spoken items compared to male-spoken items, and forgetting benefits were eliminated among female listeners but not among male listeners. These results suggest that information conveyed in a female voice draws attention to its distinct perceptual attributes, thus interfering with

SUBMITTER: Yang H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3655030 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature