An fMRI Study of Sex Differences in Regional Activation to a Verbal and a Spatial Task

“A number of studies have specifically provided evidence for organizational differences in male and female brains during mental rotation (Gur et al., 2000; Haier et al., 2004, 2005; Halari et al., 2006; Hugdahl et al., 2006), although the modal study investigated small, unrepresentative samples with mostly correlationa…”

“Variation in fetal testosterone levels has been shown to affect male spatial ability later in life (Hier and Crowley Jr. 1982; Hampson et al. 1998).”

“Changes in the relative level of activation within brain regions of the working memory network have been reported in better- and worse-performing healthy subjects [Callicott et al., 1999; Jansma et al., 2001; Ragland et al., 1997] and across genders [Gur et al., 1995, 2000].”

“Verbal reasoning is a reliable measure of general intellectual abilities that has been shown to activate left temporo-parietal regions (Gur et al., 1982; 2000).”

“Parallel differences in visual-spatial versus verbal skills have been described between normal males and females (Baron-Cohen et al. 2005; Browne 2005; Crow et al. 1998; Gur et al. 2000; Kramer et al. 1996; Lawrence 2006; Schoenemann 2006; Walder et al. 2006b).”

“…neuroimaging (e.g., De Bellis et al., 2001; Goldstein et al., 2001; Gur et al., 1999; Lenroot et al., 2007) and functional imaging measures (e.g., Gur et al., 2000; Gur et al., 1982, Gur et al., 1995; Lenroot & Giedd, 2010), including volumetric differences in executive and memory-related areas,…”

“While some authors found that hese differences in activation patterns were associted to a difference in performance (Gur et al., 2000; agland et al., 2000), other authors found that differnces in activation had no effects on performance Jaerger et al.”

“Functional brain imaging studies have reported a number of sex differences (Cahill et al., 2001; Gur et al., 2000; Haier and Benbow, 1995; Mansour et al., 1996; Neubauer et al., 2002; Shaywitz et al., 1995, 2001), but task-specific demands on cognitive resources with functional studies must always be considered as the…”

“The sex-specific activations in the posterior cortical regions could represent sex-specific attentional strategies and or sex-specific cortical organization patterns of functions located in this region[23,24,40,54,57] .”

“…to rely more heavily on task-specific strategies (e.g., Glabus et al., 2003; McNamara & Scott, 2001) and show patterns of task-elicited cerebral activation that are more task and/or hemisphere specific (e.g., Cabeza et al., 2004; Glabus et al., 2003; Gur et al., 2000; Papousek & Schulter, 2004).”

“It has furthermore been suggested that 1 reason for the superior visuospatial performance in males is their stronger rightward functional lateralization in the parietal lobe (Gur et al. 2000), but this has been challenged by other authors (Dietrich et al. 2001; Halari et al. 2006).”

“Gur et al. (2000) and Jordan, Wüstenberg, Heinze, Peters, and Jäncke (2002) have demonstrated differential brain site activation between men and women when engaged in spatial tasks.”

“…demonstrated, primarily in the literature utilizing cognitiveemotional judgment tasks (Schneider et al., 2000; Killgore et al., 2001; Killgore and Yurgelun-Todd, 2001; Lee et al., 2002), though not exclusively (Schlosser et al., 1998; Gur et al., 2000; Jordan et al., 2002; Rossell et al., 2002).”

“Recently, Gur et al. (2000) found that males and females activated different brain areas during verbal and spatial tasks.”

“…No Included, d = 0.1 Vingerhoets et al., 1999 38 men, 52 women Several verbal tasks No Excluded: no separate data for spatial and verbal tasks Gur et al., 2000 14 men, 13 women Semantic decision Yes Included, d = 0.03 Kansaku et al., 2000 16 men, 14 women Story listening Yes Included, d =…”

“It is known that women have smaller brain volumes than men [Gur et al., 1999], which, in part, reflects their smaller bodies [Cosgrove et al., 2007], and that women have a higher percentage of GM, whereas men have a higher proportion of WM [Gur et al., 1999].”

“In particular, it has been suggested that females have bilateral representation of language function, whereas males have more discretely LH lateralized language (McGlone, 1980; Gur et al., 2000).”

“Increased task difficulty produced more distributed activation for the verbal and more circumscribed activation for the spatial task [68].”

“…neuroimaging (e.g., De Bellis et al., 2001; Goldstein et al., 2001; Gur et al., 1999; Lenroot, et al., 2007) and functional imaging measures (e.g., Gur et al., 1982; 1995; 2000; Lenroot & Giedd, 2010), including volumetric differences in executive and memory related areas, supporting neural…”

“…studies of pathological groups using fMRI or other functional paradigms, given the presence of sex differences in neuroanatomical abnormalities and functional deficits in these regions in a number of neuropsychiatric disorders (Goldstein et al., 1998; R. E. Gur et al., 2000; Shaywitz et al., 1995).”

“…than in men (Luders et al., 2004), more bilateral activation during verbal tasks in women (Shaywitz et al., 1995) and during spatial tasks in men (Gur et al., 2000), and greater involvement of white matter in women and of gray matter in men in different brain regions (Haier, Jung, Yeo, Head, &…”

“, 2006), or across other verbal and spatial tasks (Gur et al., 2000; Gur et al., 1999; Gur & Gur, 2016; Satterthwaite et al., 2015; Tunç et al., 2016).”

“These behavioural differences have been suggested to relate to differences in brain lateralization, with men performing better than women on certain spatial tasks due to their greater lateralization for these tasks in the right hemisphere, and women performing better than men on some verbal tasks (verbal fluency) beca…”

“…7 0.00007 L premotor − 36; − 7; 42 7 0.0003 Brain areas progressively age-correlated in males N females L medial frontal 9 ) and are in line with evidence for more bilateral parietal activation in males during visual–spatial tasks that are more right-hemispheric in females (Gur et al., 2000, 2007).”

“…in the brain, as well as a stronger lateralization of language for men than for women (Shaywitz et al., 1995; Pugh et al., 1996; Jaeger et al., 1998; Gur et al., 2000; Kansaku et al., 2000; Phillips et al., 2001; Baxter et al., 2003; Knaus et al., 2004; Clements et al., 2006; Hill et al., 2006).”

“Kring and Gordon 1998 ) and regional CBF differences (”

“One study indicated greater right hemispheric specificity for males’ and bilateral representations for females’ brains (Gur et al., 2000) and greater leftward asymmetry of frontal lobe fractional anisotropy in females than males (Szeszko et al., 2003).”

“activation in associated secondary areas than did women (Gur et al., 2000).”

“9 standard deviation units (for a review, see Andreano & Cahill, 2009), have been purported to reflect sex differences in biological factors such as neuronal lateralization (Gur et al., 2000) areas of relative brain metabolism (Li et al.”

“…n isolation (e.g., Postle, Stern, Rosen, & Corkin, 2000; Pujol et al., 999), while those investigations that have studied laterality for oth abilities have tended to include relatively small sample sizes e.g., Gur et al., 2000), making it difficult to extrapolate findings to he wider population.”

“Prior fMRI studies [6] also reported differences in brain activation during spatial tasks.”

“…al. 2000, 2003; Holland et al. 2001, 2007; Knecht et al. 2001; Wood et al. 2004; Lohmann et al. 2005; Szaflarski et al. 2006a, b; Haag et al. 2010; Stroobant et al. 2011), but only few studies have examined lateralization of multiple functions (e.g., Gur et al. 2000; Badzakova-Trajkov et al. 2010).”

“It is uncertain whether sex differences in either ‘‘cold’’ or ‘‘hot’’ cognition stem from biological or psychosocial determinants, although recent interest has focused on the role of organisational and activational effects of gonadal hormones and variation in neural substrates underlying performance on these tasks (Ba…”

“Several functional imaging studies found higher language lateralization in healthy men as compared to women (Shaywitz et al., 1995; Pugh et al., 1996; Gur et al., 2000; Kansaku et al., 2001).”

“However, for spatial tasks, functional MRI shows that men have greater activation mainly in the right lateral inferior parietal and planum temporale regions but also show some left lateralized changes, whereas women have lower activity and no evidence of bilateral activity [4].”

“Brain activation studies using functional MRI confirmed that male brains tend to activate only 1 hemisphere whereas female brains tend to activate both for a variety of functions (18, 19, 67).”

“…have reported a stronger left-sided pattern of language representation in the male brain than in the female brain (Baxter et al., 2003; Coney, 2002; Gur et al., 2000; Kansaku et al., 2000; Shaywitz et al., 1995) whereas other studies have failed to show sex differences in cerebral lateralization…”

“Therefore, although currently speculative, between- and withinsex variations in steroid effects could conceivably influence individual or sex-related attentional predispositions in humans, perhaps by contributing to parietal or hemispheric development, as line judgment appears to rely upon these neural mechanisms (Ben…”

“, 2003; Zald, 2003; Hamann and Canli, 2004) and cognition (Jaeger et al., 1998; Salmelin et al., 1999; Lambe, 1999; Gur et al., 2000; Thomsen et al., 2000; Speck et al., 2000; Kansaku and Kitazawa, 2001; Phillips et al., 2001; Goldstein et al., 2005; Azim et al., 2005).”

“However, medical research efforts employing the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe brain-behavior relationships require synching between stimuli presentation and scan acquisition within very specific time intervals (Gur et al., 2000; Gur et al., 2001).”

“It is unknown whether the differences reported above stem from biological or psychosocial determinants, although recent interest has focused on the role of organizational and activational effects of gonadal hormones and variation in neural substrates underlying performance on these tasks (Collaer & Hines, 1995; Freder…”

“…no sex differences for either global hemispheric dominance (Hund-Georgiadis, Lex, Friederici, & von Crammon, 2002; Knecht et al., 2000) or for task-specific regions of interest (Buckner, Raichle, & Petersen, 1995; Frost et al., 1999; Gur et al., 2000; Schlösser, Hutchinson, & Joseffer, 1998).”

“001).(121) Thus, it appears that spatial processing requires, for harder tasks, greater reliance on visual association cortex with minimal activation of other areas.”

“…with men performing better than women on certain spatial tasks because of their greater lateralization for these tasks in the right hemisphere, and women performing better than men on some verbal tasks because these functions are represented bilaterally in the brain (Gur et al. 2000).”

“The contribution of the striatum in language could indeed reflect a more global mechanism than being specific to language per se, although some results showed the opposite (Wang et al., 2012).”

“Sex differences have also been demonstrated in activation of the inferior frontal gyrus during phonological, lexical, and verbal reasoning tasks whereby women activate more bilateral regions compared with men (Gur et al., 2000; Shaywitz et al., 1995).”

“More specifically, this task was chosen as previously research in our lab [3] and others [4,5] has revealed differences between the sexes in lateralization, and we wanted to know if these same differences in basic visuospatial processing were present in children and adolescents.”

“Others were unable to confirm these findings (Gur et al. 2000; Halari et al. 2005, 2006; Schlosser et al. 1998; Sommer et al. 2004; Weiss et al. 2003).”

“For instance, Gur et al. (2000), who reported sex/gender differences in relation to task difficulty, asked subjects to answer to verbal associations in a verbal reasoning task.”

“Brain activation patterns show gender differences during a variety of cognitive tasks (Gur and Gur 1990; Gur et al. 1995, 2000; Speck et al. 2000; Weiss et al. 2003; Bell et al. 2006).”

“Gur et al. (2000), using a 2D rotation task, showed that males have a left activation that is not seen in females.”

“There is evidence that sex differences exist in cognitive processes such as working and spatial memory, spatial attention and spatial perception (Gur et al., 2000; Bell et al., 2006; Frings et al., 2006; Haut & Barch, 2006).”

“…activated, and that lateralized activation of specific relevant brain regions was associated with better performance on hemisphere specific cognitive tasks (Davidson et al. 1990; Gur et al. 1994, 2000; Gur and Reivich 1980; Papousek et al. 2011; Papousek and Schulter 2004; Wendt and Risberg 1994).”

“…(Rilea et al., 2004, Gallagher et al., 2000, Maitland et al., 2004), brain structure (Goldstein et al., 2001, Luders et al., 2006) and function (Goldstein et al., 2005, Gur et al., 2000, Baxter et al., 2003) that could reflect sex-specific neural organization relating to the expression of ADHD.”

“Furthermore, the hemispheric functional interaction pattern on positron emission tomography supports the notion that women have predominantly interhemispheric interactions while men have predominantly intrahemispheric interactions [ 24 , 25].”

“These tasks include mental rotation (Gur et al., 2000; Johnson, McKenzie, & Hamm, 2002) and geometric illusions (Rasmjou, Hausmann, & Güntürkün, 1999).”

“greater right hemispheric specificity, and women tending to perform better than men on some verbal tasks (verbal fluency) because these functions are bilaterally represented in the brain (McGlone, 1980; Gur et al., 2000).”

“Gur et al (2000) found that men also show more right-lateralized activation of inferior parietal and temporal lobe regions during a visuospatial task and tend to perform better when compared to women.”

“activation patterns and lateralization [6, 7, 10, 19, 21, 22].”

“Indeed, there is evidence that some executive functions are more functionally lateralized in the male brain (Gur et al., 2000; Rossell et al., 2002), whereas in the female brain there is a greater contribution of integrated hemispheric activity to executive functioning (Levy, 1977).”