Abstract
Understanding the differences in the way women and men think has made headway thanks to experiments showing how sex hormones influence cognitive capacities. Masculine and feminine sex hormones (androgens and estrogens, respectively) affect cognition in different ways and may account for some of the gender differences in cognitive abilities, allowing men and women to perform better in certain cognitive tests. In this opinion article, we discuss studies addressing differences in cognitive functions between males and females and the underlying neural substrates, as well as the effects of sex hormone supplementation. Even though some studies on patients receiving exogenous sex hormones showed gender differences that emerge at group levels on a few cognitive tasks, it is not yet clear whether these differences can be partially attributed to hormonal causes. Supplementation of female estrogen can enhance verbal skills, whereas masculine androgen can increase performance in mathematical and visuospatial tasks. Studies of the administration of exogenous sex hormones have allowed further insight into the use of sex hormones as possible cognitive enhancers.
Highlights
Research has shown that there are no indications of large sex differences in general intelligence but that each sex has advantages in specific cognitive tasks, often with small effect sizes (Hyde 2016): on average, women excel in verbal cognition tasks such as fluency, vocabulary, verbal memory, and verbal learning, as well as in fine motor dexterity, and perceptual speed tasks; while men, in turn, show an average advantage in visual memory, visuospatial ability, and math (Hyde 2014; Vidal et al 2006)
4 Faculty of Psychology & Research Center for Psychological Science, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal hormones are released from males and female gonads (Frick et al 2015), and its concentration in the bloodstream is distributed differently across genders, it is evident that estrogen levels are higher in women than men, while testosterone levels are higher in men than in women
There is mixed research showing group differences in cognitive abilities between men and women with the exception of relatively consistent findings showing superior visual abilities in males. These findings have been difficult to evaluate because it is hard to tease apart sociocultural gender differences from differences that can be attributed to biological sex differences including endogenous sex hormones
Summary
Research has shown that there are no indications of large sex differences in general intelligence but that each sex has advantages in specific cognitive tasks, often with small effect sizes (Hyde 2016): on average, women excel in verbal cognition tasks such as fluency, vocabulary, verbal memory, and verbal learning, as well as in fine motor dexterity, and perceptual speed tasks; while men, in turn, show an average advantage in visual memory, visuospatial ability, and math (Hyde 2014; Vidal et al 2006). 4 Faculty of Psychology & Research Center for Psychological Science, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal hormones are released from males and female gonads (Frick et al 2015), and its concentration in the bloodstream is distributed differently across genders, it is evident that estrogen levels are higher in women than men, while testosterone levels are higher in men than in women.
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