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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

sex differences, brain systems, cognitive tasks, verbal processing, spoken language comprehension

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Psychology

Abstract

This study investigates whether males and females use distinct brain systems while performing a picture naming task. Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that in some cognitive processing domains, such as spoken language comprehension, males and females differ in terms of brain hemisphere activation, with a tendency for stronger left hemisphere lateralization in males. The purpose of this study is to test whether an analogous hemispheric difference (or other systematic difference) might be found between males and females in a picture naming task, which includes visual and verbal processing components. Brain activation differences were assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from fourteen participants (seven males and seven females) between the ages of 18 and 30. Results did not confirm the expected hemispheric asymmetry. However, females showed increased activation in left thalamus, bilateral anterior insula/frontal opercula, left pre-motor areas, and medial prefrontal cortex including the cingulate gyrus compared to males. Though unanticipated, these observed differences provide support for a more explicit theory of sex-differences within a multi-staged model of object recognition and naming that parsimoniously tie together findings of previous reaction time studies that examined sex-differences in picture naming.

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