Memory performance is associated with education attainment: Greater influence of education in females

November is national Alzheimer's Disease awareness month. Have you ever wondered how you can help the cause? We are using crowd-sourcing to study how the brain works with a simple ten minute memory game. Come and join our scientific research study at mindcrowd.org and be part of our fight against Alzheimer's and other brain diseases. Your healthy brain can help us understand what goes wrong during disease! After you complete the test you can see your results and compare yourself against other test takers.

This figure shows several key findings from our study thus far. The data shown here is derived from approximately 20,000 test takers of all ages. We are showing three different education levels across both genders - High School degree or less, Undergraduate college degree, and Graduate degree. Note that for each gender more education is associated with higher memory performance (y-axis is test performance with higher numbers meaning better performance). In females, this effect is much more of a step-wise effect while in males the largest improvement is realized between undergraduate and graduate attainment. Secondly you can see from the figure that education attainment doesn't protect against the effect of age in memory performance (age is on the x-axis and increases from 25-85, left to right) - all education levels demonstrate an age-related decrease in performance. Lastly, you can see that males decline much more rapidly than females. This is indicated by the steeper slope of the lines in the males. So, a simple graph that demonstrates three very interesting aspects of memory performance.

This is an actual scientific study. Please help us keep the integrity of our work high by only taking the test once and by not posting the word pairs here in the comments section. Thanks.

NOTE FOR THE SCIENCE GEEKS - our memory task is a verbal paired associates learning paradigm. It tests a form of memory known as episodic memory. The significance of this effect in females is p < 2.2e-16 and in males it is p = 4.283e-15. The effect size for high school versus undergraduate is -7.12% in females and -3.41% in males, for undergraduate versus graduate it is -4.85% in females and -4.41% in males. The graph was made in R/ggplot2, the lines are linear fit with 95% shaded confidence intervals. The statistical analysis was performed using a multiple linear regression model that incorporated all of our other measured demographic and lifestyle variables (approximately 25 different other co-variates).