Gender influences on brain responses to errors and post-error adjustments
Publication year
2016Number of pages
11 p.
Source
Scientific Reports, 6, (2016), article 24435ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
SW OZ DCC SMN
Journal title
Scientific Reports
Volume
vol. 6
Languages used
English (eng)
Subject
Biological psychology; DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 3: Plasticity and Memory; Biologische psychologieAbstract
Sexual dimorphisms have been observed in many species, including humans, and extend to the prevalence and presentation of important mental disorders associated with performance monitoring malfunctions. However, precisely which underlying differences between genders contribute to the alterations observed in psychiatric diseases is unknown. Here, we compare behavioural and neural correlates of cognitive control functions in 438 female and 436 male participants performing a flanker task while EEG was recorded. We found that males showed stronger performance-monitoring-related EEG amplitude modulations which were employed to predict subjects' genders with similar to 72% accuracy. Females showed more post-error slowing, but both samples did not differ in regard to response-conflict processing and coupling between the error-related negativity (ERN) and consecutive behavioural slowing. Furthermore, we found that the ERN predicted consecutive behavioural slowing within subjects, whereas its overall amplitude did not correlate with post-error slowing across participants. These findings elucidate specific gender differences in essential neurocognitive functions with implications for clinical studies. They highlight that within-and between-subject associations for brain potentials cannot be interpreted in the same way. Specifically, despite higher general amplitudes in males, it appears that the dynamics of coupling between ERN and post-error slowing between men and women is comparable.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [202604]
- Electronic publications [100797]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [27087]
- Open Access publications [69532]
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