Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
943616 Evolution and Human Behavior 2006 11 Pages PDF
Abstract

A sexual asymmetry has been recently found on semantic memory tasks: after brain damage, a disproportionate deficit for information about biological categories has been reported more frequently for male patients. A review of cases shows that the fine-grained pattern is more complicated in that there is a strong interaction with sex: Disproportionate plant-knowledge deficits are restricted to males, whereas disproportionate animal-knowledge deficits are rare and show no sex bias. These clinical data are consistent with semantic-knowledge data from normal subjects indicating a task-invariant female advantage with plant categories. In this study, we seek an explanation for this sex-by-semantic category interaction and discuss the possible roles of a greater female experience with plant items, both ontogenetically and over evolutionary time.

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