Implicit and explicit memory formation: influence of gender and cultural habits

The study was aimed to investigate whether impending surgery, considered as a stressful life event, might interfere with memory formation like other stress and anxiety conditions do. Results do not support the hypothesis. Implicit and explicit memory performance are both unaffected by presurgery condition and seem influenced, rather, by subjects gender, education and cultural habits. Females perform generally better than males and, regardless of age and sex, higher educated individuals score higher on the explicit memory task. The habits of reading books and doing crosswords are associated to best performance on explicit and implicit memory task respectively.