Cerebral thickness reveals sex differences in verbal and visuospatial memory

Abstract

Although sex differences in behavior/cognition and brain have previously been reported and reviewed, a sex difference of verbal and visuospatial memory and the underlying neural basis still need to be explored further. In this study, we used a machine learning model to explore a sex difference of the association between brain structure and verbal/visuospatial memory based on a community older cohort (n = 1153, age ranged from 50.42 to 86.67 years). We found females outperformed males in verbal memory (t = -5.431, p < 0.001), while males outperformed females in visuospatial memory (t = 3.201, p = 0.001). The key regions related to verbal memory in females include medial temporal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and some regions around insula. According to the overlapping with Yeos 7 networks, those regions are more located in limbic, dorsal attention and default model networks, and they are also associated with face recognition and perception processes. The key regions related to visuospatial memory, which is outstanding in males, include lateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, and some occipital regions. They overlapped more with dorsal attention, frontoparietal and visual networks, and associated with object recognition processes. These findings imply the memory performance advantage of females and males is related to the different memory preprocessing tendencies and its associated network.