A growing number of imaging studies reveal that women and men do not process certain cognitive information in the same way. For instance, researchers have found that women, when trying to exit a virtual 3-D maze, activated the right parietal cortex and right prefrontal cortex; men triggered the left hippocampus alone.1 When viewing emotionally disturbing images, women showed an increase in activity on the amygdala's left side; in men, it was the right side.2 The amygdala is a small brain region associated with mood and feelings.
Fertile research ground exists for researchers who want to figure out why and how this processing differs, and more specifically, how hormones are involved. And even bigger questions lie ahead in terms of assigning any adaptive significance to these differences. "I think that it's appropriate that we should expect a fair number of proximate processing differences because the ecology of being male and the ...
