Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, United States of America.
Horm Behav. 2024 Jun;162:105544. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2024.105544. Epub 2024 Apr 20.
Essentially all neuropsychiatric diagnoses show some degree of sex and/or gender differences in their etiology, diagnosis, or prognosis. As a result, the roles of sex-related variables in behavior and cognition are of strong interest to many, with several lines of research showing effects on executive functions and value-based decision making in particular. These findings are often framed within a sex binary, with behavior of females described as less optimal than male "defaults"-- a framing that pits males and females against each other and deemphasizes the enormous overlap in fundamental neural mechanisms across sexes. Here, we propose an alternative framework in which sex-related factors encompass just one subset of many sources of valuable diversity in cognition. First, we review literature establishing multidimensional, nonbinary impacts of factors related to sex chromosomes and endocrine mechanisms on cognition, focusing on value- based decision-making tasks. Next, we present two suggestions for nonbinary interpretations and analyses of sex-related data that can be implemented by behavioral neuroscientists without devoting laboratory resources to delving into mechanisms underlying sex differences. We recommend (1) shifting interpretations of behavior away from performance metrics and towards strategy assessments to avoid the fallacy that the performance of one sex is worse than another; and (2) asking how much variance sex explains in measures and whether any differences are mosaic rather than binary, to avoid assuming that sex differences in separate measures are inextricably correlated. Nonbinary frameworks in research on cognition will allow neuroscience to represent the full spectrum of brains and behaviors.
基本上，所有的神经精神疾病诊断在其病因、诊断或预后方面都存在一定程度的性别差异。因此，许多人对性别相关变量对行为和认知的影响非常感兴趣，有几条研究路线特别显示了它们对执行功能和基于价值的决策的影响。这些发现通常是在性别二元论的框架内提出的，女性的行为被描述为不如男性“默认”那么理想——这种框架将男性和女性对立起来，淡化了两性之间在基本神经机制上的巨大重叠。在这里，我们提出了一个替代框架，其中性别相关因素仅包含认知多样性的许多来源中的一个子集。首先，我们回顾了文献，确定了与性染色体和内分泌机制相关的因素对认知的多维、非二元影响，重点是基于价值的决策任务。接下来，我们提出了两个非二元解释和分析与性别相关数据的建议，行为神经科学家无需投入实验室资源来深入研究性别差异的机制，就可以实施这些建议。我们建议（1）将行为的解释从表现指标转移到策略评估上，以避免一种错误观念，即一种性别的表现不如另一种性别的表现；（2）询问性别在测量中解释了多少方差，以及任何差异是否是镶嵌而不是二元的，以避免假设单独测量中的性别差异是不可分割地相关的。在认知研究中，非二元框架将使神经科学能够代表大脑和行为的全部范围。
