What the little differences between men and women tells us about the BOLD response

We analyzed the functional MRI signal of 15 men and 15 women. All had been presented with a flashed and a reversing, radial checkerboard stimulus. We investigated both positive and negative blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) responses. The extent of activation and the change in the neuronal activity were examined. The former, by counting the number of activated voxels, the latter by using ΔR2* as an indicator of the change in the local deoxyhemoglobin (HbR) concentration. We examined both the positive and the negative BOLD response. Positive BOLD response: The flashed checkerboard gave rise to a larger number of activated voxels than for the reversing checkerboard. The mean number of activated pixels did not differ between men and women. The peak ΔR2* was significantly larger to the flashed than the reversing checkerboard, but did not reveal a gender-related difference. We noted an attenuation of the BOLD signal amplitude with time. This attenuation was larger in women than in men. Negative BOLD response: The attenuation was also larger for the flashed than the reversing stimulus and more pronounced in the chromatic contrast compared to the luminance contrast stimulus. The extent of activation was larger for the flashed than the reversing checkerboard, but did not differ between the sexes. The ΔR2* for the chromatic contrast checkerboard was larger in men than in women. No other significant differences were found. We conclude that the difference in the extent of activation between men and women is the result of our ability to detect activated pixels using statistical methods and not the result of a difference in the processing between the sexes.