Sex Differences in the Neural Correlates of Specific and General Autobiographical Memory

Abstract

Autobiographical memory (AM) underlies the formation and temporal continuity over time of personal identity. The few studies on sex-related differences in AM suggest that men and women adopt different cognitive or emotional strategies when retrieving AMs. However, none of the previous works has taken into account the distinction between episodic autobiographical memory (EAM), consisting in the retrieval of specific events by means of mental time travel, and semantic autobiographical memory (SAM), which stores general personal events. Thus, it remains unclear whether differences in these strategies depend on the nature of the memory content to be retrieved. In the present study we employed functional MRI to examine brain activity underlying potential sex differences in EAM and SAM retrieval focusing on the differences in strategies related to the emotional aspects of memories while controlling for basic cognitive strategies. On the behavioral level, there was no significant sex difference in memory performances or subjective feature ratings of either type of AM. Activations common to men and women during AM retrieval were observed in a typical bilateral network comprising medial and lateral temporal regions, precuneus, occipital cortex as well as prefrontal cortex. Contrast analyses revealed that there was no difference between men and women in the EAM condition. In the SAM condition, women showed an increased activity, compared to men, in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal and precentral gyrus. Overall, these findings suggest that differential neural activations reflect sex-specific strategies related to emotional aspects of AMs, particularly regarding SAM. We propose that this pattern of activation during SAM retrieval reflects the cognitive cost linked to emotion regulation strategies recruited by women compared to men. These sex-related differences have interesting implications for understanding psychiatric disorders with differential sex prevalence and in which one of key features is overgenerality in AM.

Cross-cultural differences in the neural correlates of specific and general recognition

“…Our results revealed that East Asians engage regions such as the hippocampus and fusiform more than Americans during the formation of these types of memories at encoding. Taken together, this suggests that engagement of perceptual and memory systems during encoding differ by culture, and our results establish culture as another individual difference like gender (Compère et al, 2016) and aging (Dennis et al, 2008) that can impact neural regions supporting specific memory. Future research should consider whether cultural differences in specific memory reflect differences in perceptual processes related to the use of high versus low spatial frequency information.…”

Sex Differences in Trauma-Related Psychopathology: a Critical Review of Neuroimaging Literature (2014–2017)

“…These circuits have been also implicated in sex-specific patterns in cognitive processes relevant to trauma and related psychopathology, including memory, reward processing, and emotional regulation. Semantic memory associates with increased PFC and dorsal ACC (dACC) activations among females as compared to males, suggesting more emotional encoding [39]. Reward-based risk taking involves higher striatal activation in females vs. males [40], and emotional regulation has been found to associate with stronger negative amygdala-PFC connectivity and positive amygdala-insula connectivity among females and with weaker connectivity in these pathways among males [41].…”

Lack of evidence for sex differences in higher cognitive function in macaques

“…However, using a stricter threshold but not correcting for multiple comparisons (voxel-wise p<0.005, cluster size > 5mm 3 ) revealed bilateral clusters in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the female > male contrast and bilateral superior temporal sulcus, rostral prefrontal cortex and cerebellum, as well as unilateral ventral premotor cortex (Figure 4). The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex may be involved in a sex difference during autobiographical memory processing in humans (Compère et al, 2016).…”