Popular belief has always told us that females mulit-task better than males

• Popular belief has always told us that females mulit-task better than males.

• It would seem they would also have the better short term memory.

• Would they show this in a Virtual Reality environment?

• Goals

• Determine difference in short term memory between males and females.

• Motivation

• See if gender affects short term memory.

• Hypothesis of Study

• We hypothesize that female subjects will show a better short term memory.

• Henderson and Hollingworth

• The role of fixation position in detecting scene changes across saccades.
• Three factors found to affect detection.
• Visual system delivers veridical representation of scene.

• Apparatus

• Stimulus

• Subjects

• Experimental Design

• Procedure

• Analysis

• A Pentium 4 workstation with a NVIDIA 4600 graphics card.

• A Head Mounted Display (HMD) binocular eye tracker having 640 X 480 resolution per eye with separate left and right eye feeds and equipped with head phones for audio localization.

• 6 degree-of-freedom head tracking with Ascension Flock Of Birds

• A virtual room with three pictures placed on each wall.

• Each wall has a label (LEFT, RIGHT, FRONT, and BACK) indicating its position.

• Three male and three female college students.

• Age varying from 20 to 22 years old.

• 2 (Male/Female) X 1 (level of difficulty) between-subjects design

• Experimentation included one level of difficulty, and every subject went through the test under the same level of difficulty.

• Stats will contain data from the eye tracker and the program which will denote the gaze points of the subjects and information about the gaze points which coincide with the position of pictures in the virtual world.

• Ask the subject to fill out the pre-run questionnaire.

• Questions include whether or not the subjects have 20/20 vision, and if not, do they wear glasses or contacts.

• Subjects are told they will have one minute to observe the virtual room.

• Subjects enter the virtual room for one minute.

• Ask the subject to fill out the post-run questionnaire where they will circle the wall where they think each picture appeared.

• We were able to observe how they explored the virtual room by replaying each subject’s trial run.

• The lower left hand picture was what the viewer saw.

• Each picture that the subject’s eyes actually looked at, is marked with a red line.

• There is almost a 40 percent difference in the efficiency of short term memory between the sexes.

• Our hypothesis stated that our female subjects will prove to have better short term memory than our male subjects. This is definitely the case in our results.

• The experiment was a success.

• Our hypothesis was correct.

• We concluded that gender does play a role in the usage of short term memory.