Oral contraceptive androgenicity affects symmetry processing speed in a visuospatial working memory task

Abstract

Every day millions of women worldwide take oral contraceptives (OCs). Findings of their impact on cognition are inconclusive. It is suggested that OC generation may act as a potential modulating factor driving the inconsistencies among existing studies. The current study investigated whether the androgenic activity of monophasic OCs affects working memory (WM). We compared women using androgenic second generation OCs (OC2) and anti-androgenic fourth generation OCs (OC4) in addition to naturally cycling women (NC). Participants performed a visuospatial and verbal WM task. In the visuospatial WM task, participants decided whether an abstract pattern was symmetrical or not, while simultaneously maintaining a sequence of spatial positions of a square appearing in a matrix. In the verbal WM task, participants solved simple arithmetic equations while simultaneously maintaining a sequence of letters. Our results showed that NC women and OC users (OC2+4) did not differ on central measures in either WM task. However, when the OC generation was considered, OC2 users were significantly faster in the symmetry decision subtask of the visuospatial WM task compared to OC4 and NC women. This effect was thereby independent of the ethinylestradiol level in OC users. No differences between groups were found in the various measures of the verbal WM task. Our findings add further evidence that OCs androgenicity impacts selective visuospatial processes.