Sex-Related Engagement of the Hemispheres in Visuospatial Processing

Abstract

Hemispheric asymmetries in visuospatial functions were investigated in women and men with a tachistoscopic task using lateralized presentation of “Necker” cubes. A lexical decision task served as control. In either of the two tasks the procedure involved a bilateral presentation of correct and distorted items and responses had to be given by means of a nonverbal decision task. The analysis of hits in the cube task showed a right visual field advantage for women and a left visual field advantage for men, but women had more false alarms in the right visual field, whereas men showed the reverse pattern again. The lexical decision task showed similar response patterns for men and women. The distinct response behavior supports the hypothesis that tasks allowing for various strategies to choose from obviously are better suited to elicit a differential engagement of the two hemispheres in women and men.

Key Words:

• Hemispheric specialization
• sex differences
• visuospatial abilities
• signal detection analysis