Sex hormones affect spatial abilities during the menstrual cycle.

Markus Hausmann, Ditte Slabbekoorn, Stephanie H.M. van Goozen, Peggy T. Cohen‐Kettenis, Onur Güntürkün·2000·Behavioral Neuroscience
DOI 10.1037//0735-7044.114.6.1245

Abstract

The aim of this study was (a) to show that different measures of spatial cognition are modulated by the menstrual cycle and (b) to analyze which steroid is responsible for these cognitive alterations. The authors collected blood samples in 3-day intervals over 6 weeks from 12 young women with a regular menstrual cycle to analyze concentrations of estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, luteinizing hormone, and follicle-stimulating hormone. The performance on 3 spatial tests was measured during the menstrual and the midluteal phases. A significant cycle difference in spatial ability as tested by the Mental Rotation Test was found, with high scores during the menstrual phase and low scores during the midluteal phase. Testosterone had a strong and positive influence on mental rotation performance, whereas estradiol had a negative one. These results clearly indicate that testosterone and estradiol are able to modulate spatial cognition during the menstrual cycle.

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Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Sex hormones affect spatial abilities during the menstrual cycle. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0735-7044.114.6.1245
The paper
Hausmann, M., Slabbekoorn, D., van Goozen, S. H. M., Cohen‐Kettenis, P. T., & Güntürkün, O. (2000). Sex hormones affect spatial abilities during the menstrual cycle. Behavioral Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1037//0735-7044.114.6.1245

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.