Sex Differences and Menstrual Cycle Dependent Changes in Cognitive Strategies during Spatial Navigation and Verbal Fluency.

Andrea Scheuringer,Belinda Pletzer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00381

Abstract

Men typically outperform women in spatial navigation tasks, while the advantage of women in verbal fluency is more controversial. Sex differences in cognitive abilities have been related to sex-specific cognitive strategies on the one hand and sex hormone influences on the other hand. However, sex hormone and menstrual cycle influences on cognitive strategies have not been previously investigated. In the present study we assessed cognitive strategy use during spatial navigation and verbal fluency in 51 men and 49 women. In order to evaluate sex hormone influences, all participants completed two test sessions, which were time-locked to the early follicular (low estradiol and progesterone) and mid-luteal cycle phase (high estradiol and progesterone) in women. As hypothesized, men outperformed women in navigation, whereas women outperformed men in phonemic verbal fluency. Furthermore, women switched more often between categories in the phonemic fluency condition, compared to men, indicating sex-specific strategy use. Sex differences in strategy use during navigation did, however, not follow the expected pattern. Menstrual cycle phase, however, did modulate strategy use during navigation as expected, with improved performance with the landmark strategy in the luteal, compared to the follicular phase. No menstrual cycle effects were observed on clustering or switching during verbal fluency. This suggests a modulation of cognitive strategy use during spatial navigation, but not during verbal fluency, by relative hormone increases during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle.

Highlights

Sex differences depend on the type of task and have been related to sex-dependent strategy use on the one hand and sex hormone levels on the other hand
We mainly focused on hormone-dependent hypotheses, expecting associations between sex hormones, and menstrual cycle phases and cognitive strategies
While men participated within an interval of around 2 weeks, women participated in two different cycle phases, i.e., the low-hormonal early follicular phase and the high-hormonal mid-luteal phase (3–10 days after ovulation)

Summary

Introduction

Sex differences in cognitive abilities have been reported most consistently for spatial abilities, with men usually outperforming women (Linn and Peterson, 1985; Voyer et al, 1995; Weiss et al, 2003; Andreano and Cahill, 2009), while women’s superiority in verbal abilities is more controversial (Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974; Hyde and Linn, 1988; Kimura, 2002; Andreano and Cahill, 2009). Evidence for sexdependent strategy use during spatial navigation comes from participants’ self-reports (Lawton, 1994, 1996; Dabbs et al, 1998), recall of map characteristics (Galea and Kimura,1993), modulation of performance by landmark availability in the environment (Astur et al, 1998; Sandstrom et al, 1998; Andersen et al, 2012), from modulation of performance by the use of different instructions favoring either an allocentric/Euclidian or egocentric/landmark-based strategy (Saucier et al, 2002), as well as from eye-tracking studies investigating differences in duration and patterns of gazing behavior in finding a target (Mueller et al, 2008a; Andersen et al, 2012). When a wrong turn has been made, people become less disoriented with the Euclidian strategy and its use further leads to an increased possibility to choose between two or more optional routes (Lawton, 1994, 1996)

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