Tomasi D, Chang L, Caparelli E C, Ernst T
Medical Department, Building 490, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 30 Bell Avenue, Upton, NY 11973, USA.
Neuroscience. 2008 Feb 19;151(4):1006-15. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2007.08.040. Epub 2007 Dec 15.
Men and women have different cognitive abilities that might reflect sex-specific neural organization. Here we studied sex effects on brain function using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with variable acoustic noise (AN) to modulate the cognitive challenge and enhance the sensitivity for the detection of sex differences in brain activation. During the performance of a visual attention (VA) task that requires the tracking of multiple moving objects and has graded levels of difficulty, women (n=15) but not men (n=13) had shorter reaction times for "Loud" than for "Quiet" scans. Men activated more than women in the superior prefrontal and occipital cortices and the anterior thalamus. The latent connectivity of the prefrontal cortex was higher with the anterior thalamus but lower with the auditory cortex for men than for women. Increases in activation with visual attention load were larger for men than for women in the superior parietal and auditory cortices. Increased AN reduced brain activation in the parietal cortex and the anterior thalamus for men but not for women. Together, these sex-specific differences in brain activation during the VA task, at different cognitive and acoustic levels suggest differences in auditory gating of the thalamus for men and women.
男性和女性具有不同的认知能力，这可能反映了性别特异性的神经组织。在这里，我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和可变声学噪声（AN）来研究性别对脑功能的影响，以调节认知挑战并提高检测大脑激活性别差异的敏感性。在执行一项视觉注意力（VA）任务期间，该任务需要跟踪多个移动对象并且具有不同难度级别，女性（n = 15）而非男性（n = 13）在“大声”扫描时的反应时间比“安静”扫描时短。男性在额上叶、枕叶皮质和丘脑前部的激活程度高于女性。与女性相比，男性额叶皮质与丘脑前部的潜在连接性更高，但与听觉皮质的潜在连接性更低。在顶上叶和听觉皮质中，男性随视觉注意力负荷增加的激活增加幅度大于女性。增加的声学噪声使男性顶叶皮质和丘脑前部的大脑激活减少，但女性没有。总之，在VA任务期间，在不同认知和声学水平上大脑激活的这些性别特异性差异表明，男性和女性丘脑的听觉门控存在差异。
