Sex differences on brain function 1, structure 2, 3, and its genetic associations 4 as well as differential gender effects in various psychiatric diseases are inexorably moving centre stage 5. Specifically, despite higher general amplitudes in males, it appears that the dynamics of coupling between ERN and post-error slowing between men and women is comparable. They highlight that within- and between-subject associations for brain potentials cannot be interpreted in the same way. These findings elucidate specific gender differences in essential neurocognitive functions with implications for clinical studies. Furthermore, we found that the ERN predicted consecutive behavioural slowing within subjects, whereas its overall amplitude did not correlate with post-error slowing across participants. Females showed more post-error slowing, but both samples did not differ in regard to response-conflict processing and coupling between the error-related negativity (ERN) and consecutive behavioural slowing. We found that males showed stronger performance-monitoring-related EEG amplitude modulations which were employed to predict subjects’ genders with ~72% accuracy. Here, we compare behavioural and neural correlates of cognitive control functions in 438 female and 436 male participants performing a flanker task while EEG was recorded.

However, precisely which underlying differences between genders contribute to the alterations observed in psychiatric diseases is unknown. Sexual dimorphisms have been observed in many species, including humans, and extend to the prevalence and presentation of important mental disorders associated with performance monitoring malfunctions.

Ahnenblatt error sellect gender