Sex influences on the neurobiology of learning and memory.

By Joseph M. Andreano, Larry Cahill. Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.), 2009

659 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In essentially every domain of neuroscience, the generally implicit assumption that few, if any, meaningful differences exist between male and female brain function is being challenged. Here we address how this development is influencing studies of the neurobiology of learning and memory. While it has been commonly held that males show an advantage on spatial tasks, and females on verbal tasks, there is increasing evidence that sex differences are more widespread than previously supposed. Differing performance between the sexes have been observed on a number of common learning tasks in both the human and animal literature, many neither purely spatial nor verbal. We review sex differences reported in various areas to date, while attempting to identify common features of sexually dimorphic tasks, and to place these differences in a neurobiological context. This discussion focuses on studies of four classes of memory tasks for which sex differences have been frequently reported: spatial, verbal, autobiographical, and emotional memory. We conclude that the female verbal advantage extends into numerous tasks, including tests of spatial and autobiographical abilities, but that a small but significant advantage may exist for general episodic memory. We further suggest that for some tasks, stress evokes sex differences, which are not normally observed, and that these differences are mediated largely by interactions between stress and sex hormones.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e76e663ae53d24b469346ab06f7e6ff02ee614e2

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In Behavioral Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Sex Bias in Neuroscience and Biomedical Research (2010, neutral): “Sex differences in learning are associated with differences in neuroanatomy (Dalla and Shors, 2009) detectable at all levels of analysis; Andreano and Cahill (2009) conclude “it is incumbent on investigators who don’t attend to the possibility of sex influences to justify this neglect.””
Fear Extinction as a Model for Translational Neuroscience: Ten Years of Progress (2012, background): “Indeed, sex differences in emotional memories have consistently been documented in rodents and humans (reviewed in Andreano & Cahill 2009).”
NEURAL CORRELATES OF EMOTIONAL MEMORIES: A REVIEW OF EVIDENCE FROM BRAIN IMAGING STUDIES (2012, result): “Consistent with behavioral and neuroanatomical evidence suggesting differences between men and women, recent evidence from brain imaging studies also pointed to sex-related differences in the involvement of the AMY in emotional memory (e.g., Andreano & Cahill, 2009; Cahill, 2003; Hamann, 2005).”