Electrophysiological Evidence of Gender differences in Chinese words recognition

Event-related potentials were recorded in order to study gender difference in the brain processes of verbal recognition memory. 15 male and 15 female healthy volunteers received a Chinese words recognition task. Both males and females showed a positive-going parietal old/new effect, but females demonstrated larger P500 amplitudes and shorter P500 latency than males. Furthermore, the parietal old/new effect of males was significantly left-lateralized, while that of females showed more bilateral pattern. Only males elicited obvious frontally distributed old/new effect between 250 and 350 ms, which was negative-going and right-lateralized. These findings suggested that gender differences did exist in the recognition processing of Chinese words. Some of the gender differences could be interpreted as reflecting different interpreted as reflecting the involvement of different neural structures. In addition, males and females may use different strategies to make correct discrimination