Gender effect in human brain responses to bottom-up and top-down attention using the EEG 3D-Vector Field Tomography

The effect of gender in rapidly allocating attention to objects, features or locations, as reflected in brain activity, is examined in this study. A visual-attention task, consisting of bottom-up (visual pop-out) and top-down (visual search) conditions during stimuli of four triangles, i.e., a target and three distractors, was engaged. In pop-out condition, both color and orientation of the distractors differed from target, while in search condition they differed only in orientation. During the task, high-density EEG (256 channels) data were recorded and analyzed by means of behavioral, event-related potentials, i.e., the P300 component and brain source localization analysis using 3D-Vector Field Tomography (3D-VFT). Twenty subjects (half female; 32±4.7 years old) participated in the experiments, performing 60 trials for each condition. Behavioral analysis revealed that both female and male outperformed in the pop-out condition compared to the search one, with respect to accuracy and reaction time, whereas no gender-related statistical significant differences were found. Nevertheless, in the search condition, higher P300 amplitudes were detected for females compared to males (p <; 7 · 10-3). Moreover, the findings suggested that the maximum activation in females was located mainly in the left inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri, whereas in males it was found in the right inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri. Overall, the experimental results show that visual attention depends on contributions from different brain lateralization linked to gender, posing important implications in studying developmental disorders, characterized by gender differences.