Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA.
Trends Endocrinol Metab. 2023 Sep;34(9):526-538. doi: 10.1016/j.tem.2023.06.003. Epub 2023 Jul 25.
Females have historically been disregarded in memory research, including the thousands of studies examining roles for the hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala in learning and memory. Even when included, females are often judged based on male-centric behavioral and neurobiological standards, generating and perpetuating scientific stereotypes that females exhibit worse memories compared with males in domains such as spatial navigation and fear. Recent research challenges these dogmas by identifying sex-specific strategies in common memory tasks. Here, we discuss rodent data illustrating sex differences in spatial and fear memory, as well as the neural mechanisms underlying memory formation. The influence of sex steroid hormones in both sexes is discussed, as is the importance to basic and translational neuroscience of studying sex differences.
女性在记忆研究中历来被忽视，包括数千项研究检查了海马体、内侧前额叶皮质和杏仁核在学习和记忆中的作用。即使包括在内，女性通常也根据以男性为中心的行为和神经生物学标准进行判断，从而产生和延续了科学刻板印象，即女性在空间导航和恐惧等领域的记忆力比男性差。最近的研究通过在常见记忆任务中确定性别特异性策略来挑战这些教条。在这里，我们讨论了说明空间和恐惧记忆中性别差异的啮齿动物数据，以及记忆形成的神经机制。讨论了两性中性激素的影响，以及研究性别差异对基础和转化神经科学的重要性。
