Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-20-2013
Abstract
Background: Selective attention is considered one of the main components of cognitive functioning. A number of studies have demonstrated gender differences in cognition. This study aimed to investigate the gender differences in selective attention in healthy subjects. Methods: The present experiment examined the gender differences associated with the efficiency of three attentional networks: alerting, orienting, and executive control attention in 73 healthy subjects (38 males). All participants performed a modified version of the Attention Network Test (ANT). Results: Females had higher orienting scores than males (t=2.172, P < 0.05). Specifically, females were faster at covert orienting of attention to a spatially cued location. There were no gender differences between males and females in alerting (t=0.813, P >0.05) and executive control (t=0.945, P >0.05) attention networks. Conclusions: There was a significant gender difference between males and females associated with the orienting network. Enhanced orienting attention in females may function to motivate females to direct their attention to a spatially cued location.
Comments
This article was originally published in Chinese Medical Journal, available at https://doi.org/10.3760/CMA.J.ISSN.0366-6999.20122637
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).