Statistical Analysis on Gender Difference in Neural Activity for Spatial Ability Tasks

Abstract

Gender differences are investigated from the viewpoint of cognitive neuroscience in the domain of spatial ability. Five task types of geometric problems are used for the collection of task-evoked fMRI data. Although there was no gender-difference in task performance, we found gender differences in neural activity. Some of the important gender differences that we found are 1) that there are far more joint neuro-activations among the brain regions, co-activations or reverse-activations, in males than in females, 2) that the two types of joint activations were nearly half and half in females while it was mostly co-activations in males, 3) that males tend to have more co-activations in the left hemisphere than expected while females tend to have more between-hemisphere co-activations than expected, and 4) that the left-right pairs of BA's are more highly associated than average for males while they are far less associated than average for females.