This post is Marina Trakas , a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in the ethical and epistemological aspects of memories of our personal past. Marina Trakas In a recent empirical study published in the American Psychologist , researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (Yan et al. 2024) investigated a novel and relatively unexplored factor possibly contributing to the gender gap in science, particularly in citation practices: memory mechanisms. They found that during a free recall task, wherein professors were asked to remember the names of experts and rising stars in their field, male professors (but not their female counterparts) underrepresented women researchers compared to a set of baselines. One possible explanation for this finding could be that male professors either did not remember female names or recalled fewer of them due to a lack of memory traces of these names. If they never encoded this information, they cannot remember it, given that ...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health