Sex differences in cognitive functions

Gender differences in neuropsychological functioning of patients with psychiatric disorders have been studied extensively in the last years. The available studies provide conflicting results, which can be attributed to the complexity of variables influencing cognitive sex differences. In the present study, we tried to evaluate the magnitude of gender differences in verbal and visual-spatial functions and to correlate the results with a self-rating of these abilities in healthy men and women. Ninety-seven college students (51 women and 46 men) were examined with a neuropsychological battery, focusing on verbal and visual-spatial abilities. In general, we found, that women tend to perform at a higher level than men on most verbal tests and men outperform women on visual-spatial tasks. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning, that the effect sizes were generally small, which suggests the assumption, that the overlap in the distribution of male and female scores is much greater than the difference between them. Additionally, in a self-rating scale, men rated their spatial abilities significantly superior to those of women, while women did not rate their verbal abilities superior to those of men.. In this context, the relevance of socio-cultural factors, educational factors and training on the occurrence of sex differences is highlighted, as these factors add significantly to the overall explanation of neuropsychological task-performance. (C) 2002 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.