AI Article Synopsis
- This study used functional MRI to explore sex differences in how men and women perform mental rotation tasks, focusing on brain activity patterns.
- Women exhibited greater activity in regions associated with effortful, high-level processing, while men showed activation in areas linked to automatic processing and sensory input.
- The findings suggest that men's superior performance in visuospatial tasks may stem from a more automatic, unconscious neural strategy, demonstrated by their unique brain connectivity during the task.
Article Abstract
Functional MRI during performance of a validated mental rotation task was used to assess a neurobiological basis for sex differences in visuospatial processing. Between-sex group analysis demonstrated greater activity in women than in men in dorsalmedial prefrontal and other high-order heteromodal association cortices, suggesting women performed mental rotation in an effortful, "top-down" fashion. In contrast, men activated primary sensory cortices as well as regions involved in implicit learning (basal ganglia) and mental imagery (precuneus), consistent with a more automatic, "bottom-up" strategy. Functional connectivity analysis in association with a measure of behavioral performance showed that, in men (but not women), accurate performance was associated with deactivation of parieto-insular vestibular cortex (PIVC) as part of a visual-vestibular network. Automatic evocation by men to a greater extent than women of this network during mental rotation may represent an effective, unconscious, bottom-up neural strategy which could reasonably account for men's traditional visuospatial performance advantage.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.03.030 | DOI Listing |
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