Gender-selective effects of the P300 and N400 components of the visual evoked potential

Abstract

There is an ongoing controversy regarding the role of gender in modulating components of the human visual-evoked potential (VEP) and event-related potentials (ERPs). Our aim was to further characterize the role of gender on VEPs, ERPs and response performance in an object recognition task. We recorded VEPs and reaction time (RT) in a paradigm wherein subjects responded to a randomly presented "Relevant" stimulus, and did not respond when presented with "Irrelevant" or "Standard" visual stimuli. There was no effect of gender on early components of the VEP or RT to Relevant stimuli. Relevant and Irrelevant stimuli evoked distinct VEP components including the P300, N400 and late-positive (LP) ERPs that were well-discriminated from those of the Standard stimulus. Females were characterized by greater P300 and N400 responses than males for the Relevant stimulus, but exclusively greater N400 responses for the Irrelevant stimulus. There were no significant gender differences for the LP, or for the latency of any ERP component. Gender differences were not attributed to hemispheric asymmetry, as there were no significant differences in P300 and N400 VEP amplitudes between lateral occipital or parietal electrode positions. These results indicate that the N400 can be elicited in a task requiring the processing of irrelevant, but not unexpected, stimuli and that females process visual information differently than males, perhaps by increased allocation of attentional resources to distracting stimuli.

Sex differences in cognitive control are associated with midcingulate and callosal morphology

“…Similarly, correlations between P300 amplitudes and callosal morphology emphasize the relevance of interhemispheric interactions for this ERP. One has to stress that the sex-related differences reported here go well beyond those effects that have been reported earlier (e.g., Steffensen et al 2008;Conroy and Polich 2007;Yuan et al 2008), which usually indicate higher ERP amplitudes with female subjects. However, these kinds of sex differences can be explained in terms of variations in head size and geometry only, without necessarily denoting any essential functional relevance.…”

Sex differences in sensorimotor mu rhythms during selective attentional processing

“…alpha, gamma) are sensitive to the top-down effects of selective attention (Hermann & Knight, 2001;Katayama & Polich, 1998 Moreover, recent evidence has shown attention-related sex differences in neural activity occur in the visual cortex (Steffensen et al, 2008), and to a somewhat lesser extent, in the somatosensory cortex (Cheng et al, 2006;Cheng et al, 2008a, Yang et al, 2009 (Cheng et al, 2006;Cheng et al, 2008, Cheng et al, 2008b have suggested that sex differences in neural activity patterns may reflect sex-specific cognitive strategies.…”

“…Growing evidence suggests that there are measurable differences in how males and females selectively direct their attention to sensory stimuli (Neuhaus et al, 2009;Ruytiens et al, 2007;Steffensen et al, 2008). For example, a recent electroencephalography (EEG) study found sex differences of the visual evoked potential during a self-directed attention task, which suggested that females may process visual information in a more effortful manner than males by allocating more attentional resources to distracting stimuli (Steffensen et al, 2008).…”

“…For example, a recent electroencephalography (EEG) study found sex differences of the visual evoked potential during a self-directed attention task, which suggested that females may process visual information in a more effortful manner than males by allocating more attentional resources to distracting stimuli (Steffensen et al, 2008). However, the neural underpinnings of sex differences in self-directed attention to somatosensory information remain unclear.…”

Effects of Gender, Education and Non-inverting Electrode Sites on P300 Auditory Event Related Potential in Healthy Subjects

“…However, they did not consider the effect of age accurately. Steffensen et al (2008) showed that females have greater P300 responses than males [7]. However, their investigation was conducted with the use of visual stimuli.…”