Doreen Kimura provides an intelligible overview of what is known about the neural and hormonal bases of sex differences in behavior, particularly differences in cognitive ability.
In this fact-driven book, Doreen Kimura provides an intelligible overview of what is known about the neural and hormonal bases of sex differences in behavior, particularly differences in cognitive ability. Kimura argues that women and men differ not only in physical attributes and reproductive function, but also in how they solve common problems. She offers evidence that the effects of sex hormones on brain organization occur so early in life that, from the start, the environment is acting on differently wired brains in girls and boys. She presents various behavioral, neurological, and endocrinological studies that shed light on the processes giving rise to these sex differences in the brain.
Bradford Books imprint
IN A PREVIOUS STUDY (Kimura, 1961) the writer demonstrated that, when different digits are presented simultaneously to the two ears, the following results are obtained:(1) Unilateral temporal lobectomy impairs the recognition of digits arriving at the ear contralateral to the removal, a finding in agreement with other studies (Jerger & Mier, 1960;Sinha, 1959).(2) Over-all efficiency, as measured by the total number of digits correctly reported from both ears, is affected by left temporal lobectomy but not by right temporal lobectomy. Both before and after operation patients with lesions of the left temporal lobe are inferior to those with lesions of the fight, even when the groups are matched for digit span.These facts were interpreted to mean that the crossed auditory pathways in man were stronger or more numerous than the uncrossed and that the left temporal lobe played a more important part than the right in the perception of spoken material.For all groups of subjects studied, regardless of (he site of the lesion, the preoperative score was higher for the right ear than for the left. Since the right ear was presumably more strongly connected to the left temporal lobe than was the left ear, this finding suggested that verbal material arriving along this pathway had an advantage in being more reliably transmitted to the hemisphere which was dominant for speech representation. It would then follow that, in subjects with speech represented in the right hemisphere, recognition of verbal material arriving at the left ear should be more efficient. This was the hypothesis investigated in the present study.
METHOD
SubjectsThe Ss were 120 patients at the Montreal Neurological Institute with epileptogenic lesions of various parts of the brain. Of these, 107 had speech represented in the left 1 This research was supported by Grant 9401-11 to Dr. D. O. Hebb from the Defence Research Board, Ottawa, with assistance from Grant B-2831 to Dr. Brenda Milner from the U.S. Public Health Service. I wish to thank Dr. Milner for her guidance throughout the investigation and in the preparation of this paper. Thanks are also due to Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. Theodore Rasmussen for permission to work with their patients. 2 Now at the Montreal Neurological Institute.
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