Women are endowed with the capability of storing more information in their brain than their male counterparts, says a study carried out by researchers at the Cambridge University.

The study, involving 4,407 men and women from East Anglia located in southeastern England, concluded that women have better ability to store and retrieve information than their male counterparts.

A series of tests were conducted on the participants aged between 48 and 90 years. Detailed analysis of the data revealed that women, on an average, made 5.9 errors fewer than men, regardless of age and circumstances.

They also came to the conclusion that memory functions were also influenced by the level of education. Men and women who gave up schooling beyond 18 were found to make an average of 20 fewer errors than those who quit school before they were 16 years old.

“Although the links between sex and education and cognitive function have been explored before, this very large dataset provides striking evidence that these factors play a major role in determining how good our memory function is as we age," says Dr Andrew Blackwell, Chief Scientific Officer at Cambridge University's Department of Psychiatry.

Studies conducted in the past have also shown that women outperform men on verbal functions. Men, however, tend to outperform women on tasks related to spatial function.

But the Cambridge study, which used a measure of memory that is spatial, could establish that women consistently outperformed men. There are many possible explanations for this, including both neurobiological and environmental differences, researchers said.

Now Cambridge researchers are planning to confirm the finding in an even larger study comprising as many as 10,000 people.