Pregnancy may confer a selective cognitive advantage

Abstract

This study investigated women's subjective complaints of problems with memory during pregnancy and their objective performance on a variety of tests of attention and memory. Objective testing revealed no differences between pregnant women (n = 52) and controls (n = 35) on tests of attention (dot probe), intentional and incidental recall, and direct and indirect memory (stem completion). On the baseline stem condition, pregnant women completed more (neutral) stems with pregnancy words than did controls. In an incidental recognition task, third trimester pregnant women recognized more pregnancy than neutral or anxious words. Women and their informants reported memory to have deteriorated during pregnancy. Given the power of the study, these findings suggest that pregnant women (1) may perform better than controls when the material is pregnancy-related and (2) may ‘falsely’ perceive their memory to have deteriorated during pregnancy.