11 - Sex steroids and cognition

Summary

Cognitive differentiation

Previous chapters have identified the key role played by the endocrine system (especially the sex steroids) in sexual determination and differentiation, these effects stemming from both organisational and activational factors. The resulting effects on physiology and morphology are large, and are usually referred to in terms of being sexually dimorphic. Chapter 7 also discussed the possible influence of hormones on neural differentiation, and, while contentious, the evidence appears to suggest that hormones (specifically the sex steroids), acting during prenatal and pubertal periods, sculpt certain brain regions into more masculine or feminine forms. If this is indeed the case, then we might expect that such neurological dimorphisms would be reflected in sexually dimorphic processing capabilities, especially ones related to the different hemispheres (e.g. verbal versus spatial processing). While this initially appears to be simple, there are several key issues that render the interpretation of available evidence difficult:

What do we mean by cognitive processing?

A glance through any general cognitive psychology textbook (they all contain approximately the same information) will reveal a wide range of cognitive processes that we could consider. They normally include perception, attention, memory (long-term, short-term and working memory), visuospatial processes, executive processes, decision-making, problem-solving, reasoning and language. These processes can be assessed by a wide variety of tests utilising various methods of presentation and data capture.