Women more likely to recall how you look

The ladies, apparently, never forget a face — or a hairstyle, necklace or argyle sweater, for that matter.

A study from the Ohio State University finds that women remember more about appearance than men: They recall clothes, jewelry and eye color. Shoes and sweater patterns resonate with women, as do postures and gestures.

Terrence Horgan, the psychologist who led the study, was reluctant to weigh in on the greater implications of it all. He couldn’t tell whether the inclination to remember sartorial details would affect the work of, say, a female politician, physician, detective or journalist.

“This is really all about interpersonal sensitivity,” Mr. Horgan said.

Women have an extra share of it.

“They’re more people-oriented. Women seem to enjoy a certain advantage over men in picking up nonverbal cues, lending them insight about somebody’s feelings, about their behavior, personality or social status,” he said.

The feminine touchy-feely factor has been explored elsewhere. Researchers at Stanford University in California found two years ago that women remember emotional events better than men because they are equipped with “a different neural mechanism.”

Texas A&M University determined that women are more sensitive to loud noises than men, and the University of Arizona found that women are far more sensitive to stinky odors than men. Last year, Yale University researchers revealed that women smile more often than men because they do more “emotion work.”

An appearance-sensitivity analysis might put the fellows at a distinct disadvantage.

Mr. Horgan — who conducted the study with support from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation — did his best to give men equal cultural footing during his research by using neutral terminology.

“Men might not have the specific fashion-type vocabulary to describe how someone looked. They might not know, for example, that somebody was wearing a pair of ’capri pants,’” Mr. Horgan said. “We used terms like ’short pants.’”

In four out of five studies involving several hundred college students, women outdid men in tests for “appearance memory” of people they had met in person or seen in videotapes or slides.

The students were asked to recall jewelry, hairstyles, eye colors, gestures, posture, sweater patterns and other striking features, then tested for accuracy.

“The overall results favor women,” the study says.

It also found the appearance of women is more memorable as well, which Mr. Horgan theorizes could be because of their diversity of fashion styles rather than mere ogling.

“The participants didn’t look at women any longer than they looked at men,” the study said.

The advantage for women does have “real-world implications,” Mr. Horgan said. “We use appearance cues to categorize individuals, to help us understand them. This helps us to interact better with others.”

His study appears in the current monthly bulletin of the Stanford University-based Society for Personality and Social Psychology.