Increasing evidence from clinical and developmental studies suggests that men and women have different language abilities and respond differently to brain damage, affecting the language network. Our main hypothesis is that these differences could be related to possible sex differences in the structural and functional characteristics of the brain language network.
The specific aims of the Axis 1 are to determine sex differences in:
the functional network sustaining the brain language the characteristics of white matter fiber bundles connecting the core regions of the language network in the discourse features The natural development of the proposed program in the next few years is to try to determine the specific effects of sex and gender on language functions and brain correlates.
Healthy adults possess distinctive, heterogeneous patterns of relative strengths and weaknesses across various cognitive domains such as attention, processing speed, working memory, and long-term memory (cognitive profile). The gold standard for obtaining an individual’s cognitive profile is administering an in-depth neuropsychological evaluation. However, a complete neuropsychological evaluation is expensive and time-consuming. Identifying accurate biomarkers of cognitive profiles of healthy individuals based on short and easy-to-implement data collection represents an interesting and poorly explored challenge in fundamental neuroscience.