| Abstract [eng] |
Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) are electrical brain responses to a certain type of auditory stimuli during a precise task that are captured with the help of electroencephalography. ERPs waves named P3 and N2 can evaluate cognitive skills such as attention, working memory, and response inhibition. They are found to be impaired in psychiatric disorders and despite sex related differences that are found in prevalence of the disorders, as well as in auditory system and functioning, sex-effect is still being ignored in scientific studies. We wanted to evaluate sex factor in auditory ERPs evoked with simple tasks (that are promising for application in psychiatry) in healthy subjects. An experiment and a systematic review were conducted. In the experiment with an auditory equiprobable Go-NoGo task we found higher P3 amplitudes in females as opposed to males in Go condition (that requires a response initiation), but no sex differences in NoGo (when response inhibition was needed). N2 amplitudes were comparable between sexes, and N2 and P3 latencies were found to be longer in females. The systematic review provided support for potential sex-related differences; however, results are inconclusive: higher P3 amplitudes in females reported in half of the included studies, the other half found no sex effect. P3 latencies were found to be indifferent between sexes. |
