Different Views about the Nature of Gender-Related Asymmetries in Tasks Based on Biological or Artefact Categories

Guido Gainotti,Camillo Marra,Maria Caterina Silveri,Francesca Ciaraffa

doi:10.1155/2010/410858

Guido Gainotti, Camillo Marra + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1155/2010/410858

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Abstract

Sex-related asymmetries in the ability to process different semantic categories have been reported both in normal subjects and in brain-damaged patients, but the nature of these asymmetries is still controversial. Some authors suggest that these differences might be due to social-role related familiarity factors, whereas others attribute them to inborn neural differences rooted in evolution. Drawing in part on this second line of thought, some authors have suggested that gender-related asymmetries might be due to differences in stimulus processing between men and women, namely, to the tendency of females to focus mainly on perceptual features and of males to focus equally on both perceptual and functional features. To test this hypothesis, we asked 53 male and 65 female undergraduate students to evaluate the relevance of a number of perceptual and functional features in the representation of various kinds of biological and artefact categories. Contrary to the hypothesis, evaluation of the weight of different sources of knowledge in representing living and artefact categories was similar in males and females.

Highlights

A sizable body of data, recently gathered both in normal subjects and in brain-damaged patients, suggests there are sex-related asymmetries in the ability to process different semantic categories.For example, significant and consistent asymmetries have been observed in normal subjects on speeded naming [22] and identification [23] tasks, on name generation tasks [25], on semantic fluency tasks [8,9], and on object decision tasks [3]
The main purpose of the present study was to check the Bermeitinger et al.’s [4] hypothesis that genderrelated differences in the ability to process different semantic categories may not be due to familiarity factors, but rather to a tendency of females to focus mainly on perceptual features and of males to focus on perceptual and functional features
To evaluate this hypothesis we recruited two groups of undergraduate students and asked them to evaluate the relevance that a number of perceptual and functional types of information could have in our knowledge of various kinds of biological and artefact categories

Summary

Introduction

A sizable body of data, recently gathered both in normal subjects and in brain-damaged patients, suggests there are sex-related asymmetries in the ability to process different semantic categories.For example, significant and consistent asymmetries have been observed in normal subjects on speeded naming [22] and identification [23] tasks, on name generation tasks [25], on semantic fluency tasks [8,9], and on object decision tasks [3]. A sizable body of data, recently gathered both in normal subjects and in brain-damaged patients, suggests there are sex-related asymmetries in the ability to process different semantic categories. Analogous asymmetries have been found in brain-damaged patients [10,16,19,21, 26,28,31], in whom a relative sparing of the categories showing a sex-related advantage in normal subjects has usually been observed. Other authors have argued that the pattern of genderrelated asymmetries is more complex than the simple distinction between biological and artefact categories, because men show an advantage for some living categories (such as ‘animals’) and women for some artefact categories (such as ‘furniture’ and ‘kitchen utensils’)

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