Assignment 2 brain sex experiment

KMF 1014 Introduction to Cognitive
Science
Assignment 2: Brain Sex Experiment
Difference Between The Male and Female
Brain
Prepared by: Group 5
Alfred Voon Khai Woon 55604 Kristin Shim Siok Lim
56334
Bong Pui Chee 55605 Tay Liang Howe

Summary of Baron Cohen Article
• In today’s society, people enjoy great academic freedom discussing
about the field of sex difference in psychology.
• Empathizing-systemizing theory, a new theory, claims that the female
brain is more to empathy while male brain is more to understanding
and building systems.
• The empathizer knows how people are feeling and treat people with
care and sensitivity whereas systemizer discover how things work and
the mechanism in controlling a system.
Introduction

• There are 3 types of Common Brain:
Type E
• Empathizing is stronger than systemizing
• More females have this profile
Type S
• Depicts that systemizing is stronger than empathizing.
• More males have this profile
Type B
• Illustrate that people are equally strong in their systemizing and empathizing
Introduction

• Males are fond in construction systems which require high
systemizing
• This affects the options of males in choosing professions
• Males show more ‘direct’ aggression
• A male newcomer would probably hijack the game by trying
change it and seek everyone’s attention
• Boys often just ignore the newcomers.
• Males have better spatial intelligence than females
• A Cambridge study found that at one year old, boys prefer to
watch a film of cars than person’s face
Male
Male VS. Female

• Interested in enacting social and emotional themes
• Usually more sensitive to others
• Women are more empathy than men
• More conscience to facial expressions
• better at decoding non-verbal communication and judging character
• In contrast, females show more ‘indirect’ aggression
• A female newcomer would first observe and then try to fit in the activity
• Girls are usually better hosts
• They pay more attention to newcomers
• Girls look at a face with a longer time by the study from Cambridge
university shoes that at birth.
Female
Male VS. Female

• Prone to ‘ramming’ game
• Show more ‘direct’ aggression
• Would probably hijack the game
by trying change it and seek
everyone’s attention
• Often ignore the newcomers.
• Boys look at suspended
mechanical with a longer time.
• Fond in construction systems
which require high systemizing
• Have better spatial intelligence
Male
• Interested in enacting social and
emotional themes
• Show more ‘indirect’ aggression
• Would first observe and then try to
fit in the activity
• Pay more attention to newcomers
• Girls look at a face with a longer
time
• Usually more sensitive to others
• More empathy
Female
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE

Summary of Baron Cohen ArticleBiological Aspect
• Boys born synthetic female hormone are
likely to show female characteristics.
• Male babies born with small testes normally
have low levels of testosterone.
• They are worse at spatial aspects of
systemizing.
• Babies with high levels of androgens
normally have enhanced spatial systemizing.
• The E-S theory helps us explain why
individuals are typical or atypical for their
sex.
• Earlier studies of psychological sex
differences have focused on spatial ability,
mathematical ability and verbal ability.

Summary of Baron Cohen ArticleBiological Aspect
• Males perform better in the first two area
and females perform better at the last
area.
• Spatial and mathematical abilities involve
systemizing which fit for the E-S theory.
• However, verbal ability may have no
association with empathy.
• Nevertheless, good empathizing and
good verbal sills both facilitate
communication, so that verbal and
empathy skills may have relations.

Summary of Annals Of Neuroscience
Gender Cognitive Functions
• Cognition Includes…
Attention
Learning
Memory
Verbal Ability
Visuospatial Function
Executive function
There is paucity of the data related to
cognitive function amongst healthy
adolescent age group which limits our
ability to distinguish and compare
cognitive changes that occur across the
adult lifespan in female and male
subjects separately and can provide some
help to understand dementia related
conditions

• Study was carried out in the department of Physiology, SGRRIM&HS, Dehradun
 200 mentally and physically healthy volunteers of both sexes of 17–19 years
after getting permission from the institutional ethical committee for the
study.
 Montreal Cognition Assessment Test (MOCA), 2 a 10 min: 30-points test, was
undertaken to score cognitive abilities on 7 subtests:
Visuo-spatial Skills
Language
Memory
Attention
Mathematical
ability
Abstraction
Orientation

• Difference in overall level of cognition amongst the two sexes was
not found in the studies of Kimura D, Herlitz A, Halpern DF, Downing
K & Voyer E
 Proclaim that most of the standard tests shaped to avoid gender
bias
 almost all of these gender based studies quote differences in
the various components of cognitive abilities.
• Out of 7 subsets of Cognition test, obtained higher scores in 4
subtests in female subjects, 2 equal scores and 1 higher score in
male subjects thus obviously raising the overall score in female
subjects

• Estrogen have an inhibitory influence on visuospatial skills.
 Can be explained on the basis of changing trend of the technologies, indulgence
and predilection of females since childhood.
• Men with higher levels of endogenous testosterone
were expected to perform better than men with lower
levels and postulated to be linked to the presence of
receptors in the certain brain areas.
• But some investigators mentioned non-significant
association to androgens.
 It appears that early prenatal presence of
androgens may organize the male brain to enhance
certain spatial functions.

• Higher level of testosterone can affecting the spatial ability by
the results of studies on females
• Congenital adrenal hyperplasia showing better visuospatial
skills
• Females excelled visuospatial skills, language, memory, attention
subtests for cognition and statistically significant results were
found for visuospatial skills and memory.
• Earlier studies have revealed that men performed higher level on
most visuospatial tasks than women and these were correlated
to the influence of sex hormone levels (testosterone).

• Inferior performance of these patients in tasks that imply
attention and memory, prone to improvement with the
administration of estrogens.
• In neuroimaging studies during neuropsychological task
performance in temporal and parietal cortical areas in young and
postmenopausal women:
• Receiving estrogen treatment, greater activation, increased
blood perfusion and glucose metabolism in certain brain
regions related with memory and other cognitive functions
have been found.
• The results can still not be regarded conclusive due to the
reduced number of studies and the differences in methods used.

• This study provides preliminary data to show that:
• Men are not intellectually superior to women in
visuospatial skills
• The handling of computers, driving, participation
in outdoor activities since early childhood and
rising education and job opportunities for girls
have brought drastic advances in the skills.
• These results can further be highlighted in view of
the educational status of the subjects (medical
students) of the present study representing changes
in lifestyles.

Summary of Scientific American Sex
Differences In The Brain
• Men and women differ in many characteristics
 Including the way they solve intellectual
problems.
• The behavioural differences are minimal and are the
consequences of variations in experience during
development before and after adolescence.
• Males are more aggressive than
females
• engage in more rough-and-tumble
play than females

• Hypothalamus
 The area in the brain that regulates female
and male reproductive behaviour.
 Tiny structure at the base of the brain
connects to the pituitary, the master
endocrine gland.
 Visibly larger in male rats than in females
and size difference is under hormonal
control.

• Sex differences in problem solving have
been systematically studied in adults in
laboratory situations.
• Men perform well at certain spatial tasks.
• Men are good in imagining rotating
an object or manipulating it in some
other way, mathematical reasoning
tests and in navigating their way
through a route.
• Men exhibit more accuracy in tests of
target-directed motor skills, which is
in guiding or intercepting projectiles.
Doreen (2002)

• Women excel on tests that
measure recall of words and
identifying matching items and
performing certain precision
manual tasks.
• It is important to keep in mind that
some of the average sex
differences in cognition vary from
slight to quite large and that men
and women overlap enormously
on many cognitive tests that show
average differences
• Functions such as basic speech and
spatial ability, there are no major sex
differences in hemispheric asymmetry,
 Although there may be such
disparities in certain more abstract
abilities, such as defining words

• Hemisphere damage have a more devastating
effect on spatial performance in men
• Known overall differences between men
and women in spatial ability were related
to differing dependence on the right brain
hemisphere.
• A long history of studying people indicates that
the left hemisphere of the brain is critical for
speech and the right for perceptual and spatial
functions.

• Researchers have widely assumed that the
right and left hemispheres of the brain are
more asymmetrically organized for speech and
spatial functions in men than in women.
• Perceptual techniques that measure brain
asymmetry in normal-functioning people
sometimes show smaller asymmetries in
women than in men
• Damage to one brain hemisphere
sometimes has less of an effect in women
than the comparable injury in men does.

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• To investigate the secret of sexes:
 A group of volunteers has been selected from variant of
background.
 The volunteers consist of five men and five women,
they has been informed earlier that every action will be
recorded.
• An actor will pretended to be ordinary driver and fetch the
volunteers to the test destination:
 Inside the vehicle there is a hidden camera that will
recorded every conservation they have, after they
reached the destination they been asked to recall what
they remember during the conversation in the vehicle
What is the Video About?

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• Their first task is to complete the BBC online sex
survey, they will be tested from everything to
languages, love, geometry and greed.
• Second, they have been separated according to
gender into a room with a television showing a
news, broadcasted by one male and one female
newscaster.
• After the news ended, they were asked to recall
what they remember

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• Women claimed that they are emotional, friendly,
caring, sensitive and understanding.
• In order to test women are really caring, a social
experiment has been conducted, an 8 years old actress
will be “abandoned” in the London Street, to observe
what is the pedestrians reaction.
• At the end of experiment, there is 41 women and only 2
men stopped by and willing to help the “abandoned
child”.

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• Among all the volunteers, there is one husband and wife,
they are Craig and Liz. Recently, they having quarrel
because Craig seem to be cannot understand what Liz
want, in other word, they having communicating failure.
• The BBC team asked a neuroscientist, Professor Ruben to
help to scan their brain using Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(MRI).
• The scan showed that Liz has activation and Craig does not
have activation on the emotional part of the brain. This
result surprised them that this is the reason why Craig
most of the time cannot handle Liz’s emotional that leads
them to communicating failure.

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• Next test is they all given a headset and to ask to listen
some makeup words
• Both side of headset has different words play in the
same time.
• Men can listen one word on right side clearly but not
both while women can listen to both words at the same
time.
• The results of the test is that men use only right brain to
listen meanwhile women will use both side of brain for
listening

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• After that, they were asked to participate in a Go-Kart
racing competition and to test their testosterone
changed throughout the race.
• During the competition, the testosterone level of men
increase dramatically but women have zero increase of
testosterone, this can be explained that men like
competition and dare to take risk compared to women.
One of the competitor,
• Lloyd, has higher increase of testosterone level among
others but this leads him to makes more mistakes thus
he lost the race.

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• Professor John Manning want to further confirmed his
proposal.
• He then scan the volunteers finger and see whether
does the volunteers’ testosterone level fit their gender,
there is one exception.
• A woman named called Grace has similar level of
testosterone with men, so the professor ask them all to
involve in a challenge and again, predict who will
outstanding others.
• Within professor’s expectation, Grace performed the
best among all the women.

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• Lastly, volunteers been asked to change the diaper of a
baby, to observe their child care skills according to gender.
• The women do the task very well but men struggling how
to change the diaper, Craig who has super male brain
struggled the most.
• At the end, all women pick up the baby after diaper
changed, in contrast, most men just step away after they
are done except Craig.
• This can be explained by that he knew he cannot handle
the task well, so he try to work harder, in order for him to
do that, he knew that he need to have connection with
baby.

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• During the conversation with the cab driver, men
and women remember different thing on what they
heard and see.
• Men remembered mostly about objects and
surroundings while women remembered mostly
about emotion facts and people.
• For the experiment about news broadcasting, men
can remember some news of male broadcaster said
but none from female broadcaster because they put
their focus mainly on the appearance of female
broadcaster instead of listening on what she said.
What does it say about males and
females?

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• Women are emotional, friendly, caring, sensitive
and understanding. This can be explained by
“abandoned child” social experiment where 41
women willing to help the child instead of men
where only 2 stopped by.
• Another test is headset playing both different words
at the same time, the results is that men tend to use
only right brain to listen meanwhile women use
both side of brain for listening.
females?

Video: Secret of
Sexes
• Male foetus in 8th week will started to produce great
amount of testosterone. Different gender of baby shows
different behaviour at the early age, girls will like to and
interested in looking at human face while boys look at
everything, this can be explained that girls like people
and boys like things.
• In week 16th, the testosterone level already able to
show that it is related to eye contact on what they see,
social relationship they have, interests, and how fast
they learn to talk.
• According to study, male is better in visual skills while
female better in emotional skills but that is not an
accurate study because level of testosterone will effects
the outcome.
females?

Name
Question
Alfred Voon Bong Pui Chee Ngui Chun Cheah Kristin Shim Tay Liang Howe Ten Soon Yuan
Gender Male Female Male Female Male Male
Handedness Right Right Right Right Right Right
Answer of Questionnaire
1 Yes Yes Yes Yes No No
2 No Yes Yes No Yes Yes
3 No No No No No No
4 No No Yes No No Yes
5 No Yes Yes No Yes Yes
6 No No No No Yes No
7 Yes No No Yes Yes No
8 Yes No Yes No No Yes
9 Yes No Yes Yes No No
10 No Yes Yes No No Yes
12 Yes Yes No No Yes Yes
13 No Yes Yes Yes No Yes
15 No Yes No Yes Yes Yes
16 Yes No No Yes No Yes
17 Yes Yes Yes No No Yes
18 Yes Yes Yes No Yes No
19 Yes No Yes Yes No Yes
20 No No Yes No No No
Total Score 9 9 7 11 8 7

Questionnaire: Short
Commentary
From the result we have obtained:
• Our male group members:
 Alfred Voon, Ngui Chun Cheah, Tay Liang Howe
and Ten Soon Yuan
 All of them found to have “male” brain which
based on the brain sex test.
 They obtained the score around 7 to 9 in the brain
sex test and it was meant to have a “male” brain.
Alfred Voon
Ngui Chun Cheah
Ten Soon Yuan
Tay Liang Howe

Questionnaire: Short
Commentary
From the result we have obtained:
• Our female group members:
• Kristin Shim and Bong Pui Chee
• The result of Bong Hui Chee is very impressive to us. She had
found to have a “male” brain instead of having a “female brain”.
She scored the mark of 9 in the brain sex test and it was mean to
have a “male” brain.
• For Kristin Sim, she obtained the score of 11 marks in the brain sex
test, and she was found to have a “female” brain.
Kristin Shim
Bong Pui Chee
In conclusion, we can conclude that gender does not describe how the brain
function. Even though, you are a female, you might have a “male” brain and
boy attitudes.

References
Baron-Cohen, S. (2003) The essential difference: Men, women and the extreme
male brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kimura, D. (2002, May 13). Right hemisphere damage. [Digital image]. Retrieved
from https://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm
Kimura, D. (2002). Sex differences in the brain. Retrieved from
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-differences-in-the-brain-2002-
04/
Mittal, S., Verma, P., Jain, N., Khatter, S., & Juyal, A. (2012). Gender based variation
in cognitive functions in adolescent subjects. Annals of neuroscience, 19(4),
165-168.

NAME MATRIC NUMBER
ALFRED VOON KHAI WOON 55404
BONG PUI CHEE 55605
NGUI CHUN CHEAH 56947
KRISITN SHIM SIOK LIN 56334
TAY LIANG HOWE 58108
TEN SOON YUAN 58123
Prepared by: Group 5

Assignment 2 brain sex experiment

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (20)

En vedette

En vedette (20)

Similaire à Assignment 2 brain sex experiment

Similaire à Assignment 2 brain sex experiment (20)

Dernier

Dernier (15)

Assignment 2 brain sex experiment