Psychophysical and Neurophysiological Characteristics of the Assessment of Tilted Orientations in Men and Women

• Published in: Neuroscience and behavioral physiology Vol. 51; no. 6; pp. 820 - 830
• Main Authors: Mikhailova, E. S., Gerasimenko, N. Yu, Kushnir, A. B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.07.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Event-related potentials; Information processing; Neurobiology; Neurosciences; Occipital lobe; Psychophysics; Reaction time task; Sex differences; Steroid hormones; Visual discrimination; Visual pathways; Women; vision; orientation; visual perception; tilted orientations; event-related potentials; visual cortex
• ISSN: 0097-0549; 1573-899X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11055-021-01139-6

This report addresses studies of sex-related differences in the discrimination of tilt orientations. The task of determining the closeness of tilt orientations to horizontal or vertical references or references tilted at 45° was assessed in 34 subjects (16 men and 18 women) with normal vision. Accuracy, reaction time, and event-related potentials in the caudal areas of the cortex were recorded. Women were found to make more errors than men, though there were no differences in reaction time. Sex-related differences were detected in the early analysis of tilted orientations. The amplitude of the early negativity N1 of ERP in the occipital cortex was found to depend on line slope only in men: responses to tilted lines close to the cardinal axes had the lowest amplitudes, while those close to 45° produced the greatest-amplitude responses. It is suggested that sex-related differences in the early sensitivity of the occipital cortex to tilted orientations are based on the features of information processing in the dorsal and ventral visual pathways, which are determined by the pre- and postnatal influences of steroid hormones [Handa and McGivern, 2014].