Sex Differences in Functional Brain Activation during a Lexical Visual Field Task

Abstract

Functional MRI was used to investigate sex differences in brain activation during a paradigm similar to a lexical-decision task. Six males and 6 females performed two runs of the lexical visual field task (i.e., deciding which visual field a word compared with a pseudoword was presented to). A sex difference was noted behaviorally: The reaction time data showed males had a marginal right visual field advantage and women a left visual field advantage. Imaging results showed that men had a strongly left-lateralized pattern of activation, e.g., inferior frontal and fusiform gyrus, while women showed a more symmetrical pattern in language related areas with greater right-frontal and right-middle-temporal activation. The data show evidence of task-specific sex differences in the cerebral organization of language processing.