Examining Gender Differences in Neurocognitive Functioning Across Adulthood

Abstract

Objective:Previous research has shown that women have an advantage on verbal episodic memory and processing speed tasks, while men show an advantage on spatial ability measures. Previous work has also found differences in cognition across age. The current study examines gender differences in neurocognitive functioning across adulthood, whether age moderates this effect, and whether these differences remain consistent with practice across multiple testing sessions.Method:Data from the Virginia Cognitive Aging Project were used, which included participants between the ages of 18 and 99 years (N = 5125). Participants completed measures assessing five cognitive domains: episodic memory, processing speed, reasoning, spatial visualization, and vocabulary.Results:Results showed that gender was significantly related to memory, speed, and spatial visualization, but not to vocabulary or reasoning. Results of invariance analyses across men and women provided evidence of configural and metric invariance, along with partial scalar invariance. Additionally, there was little evidence that age or practice influenced the gender effect on neurocognition.Conclusions:Consistent with the previous research, these results suggest that there is a female advantage in episodic memory and processing speed, and a male advantage in spatial visualization. Gender was shown to influence cognition similarly across adulthood. Furthermore, the influence of gender remained the same across three sessions, which is consistent with the previous work that has shown that training does not differentially impact performance on spatial ability measures for females compared to males.

Cognitive profiles in older males and females

“…When examining measurement invariance between the two sexes, thus whether a cognitive profile would fit equally well to males and females, we again found an acceptable but not excellent model fit already in the configural model (composition of the components), with further significant decreases when it comes to mean and intercept invariances. While some fit values do not differ from previous results obtained by Siedlecki et al 22 , who interpreted a CFI value of 0.941 as being acceptable, they are low as compared to other studies investigating measurement invariance in cognitive or psychological profiles between, e.g. healthy adults and Alzheimer patients or using longitudinal models of sex differences over the whole adulthood 61 , 62 .…”

“…Averaged over the two sexes, cognitive performance decline is well established during the aging process 24 – 27 with a significant decline starting in the mid 50’s 24 , especially in the domains of executive functions, working memory and episodic memory. However, previous studies not only showed that sex-differences in cognitive performance persist until late adulthood 2 , 22 , 23 , they also reported unbalanced prevalence in neurodegenerative diseases that are accompanied by different cognitive impairments, i.e. males rather suffer from MCI and Parkinson’s disease, while females are more often affected by Alzheimer’s disease 28 , 29 .…”

“…Particularly interesting in this aspect is the older adult population, since sex differences in cognitive performance were found to persist until late adulthood and might even lead to differences in cognitive impairments during older age and disease 2 , 22 , 23 . So far, the majority of studies investigate cognitive performance during aging while correcting for sex differences.…”

The dynamic association between body mass index and cognition from midlife through late-life, and the effect of sex and genetic influences

“…As sex differences are present in both BMI 4 and cognitive abilities 6 across adulthood, associations between the two phenotypes must be considered by sex. How BMI reflects body fat may differ for men and women.…”

Sleep-Wake Disturbances and Episodic Memory in Older Adults

“…In the second series of models, the statistically significant ( p ≤ 0.05) sleep-wake disturbances variables from the first series of models were entered as independent variables. The covariates of age (Cansino, 2009), gender (Siedlecki et al, 2019), body mass index (Loprinzi & Frith, 2018), and health conditions (Edwards et al, 2018) were entered in the second regression models if they were significantly correlated with episodic memory at p < 0.05 (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2013).…”