RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Accurate sex classification from neural responses to sexual stimuli
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2022.01.10.473972
DO 10.1101/2022.01.10.473972
A1 Vesa Putkinen
A1 Sanaz Nazari-Farsani
A1 Tomi Karjalainen
A1 Severi Santavirta
A1 Matthew Hudson
A1 Kerttu Seppälä
A1 Lihua Sun
A1 Henry K. Karlsson
A1 Jussi Hirvonen
A1 Lauri Nummenmaa
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/11/2022.01.10.473972.abstract
AB Sex differences in brain activity evoked by sexual stimuli remain elusive despite robust evidence for stronger enjoyment of and interest towards sexual stimuli in men than in women. To test whether visual sexual stimuli evoke different brain activity patterns in men and women, we measured haemodynamic brain activity induced by visual sexual stimuli in two experiments in 91 subjects (46 males). In one experiment, the subjects viewed sexual and non-sexual film clips and dynamic annotations for nudity in the clips was used to predict their hemodynamic activity. In the second experiment, the subjects viewed sexual and non-sexual pictures in an event-related design. Males showed stronger activation than females in the visual and prefrontal cortices and dorsal attention network in both experiments. Furthermore, using multivariate pattern classification we could accurately predict the sex of the subject on the basis of the brain activity elicited by the sexual stimuli. The classification generalized across the experiments indicating that the sex differences were consistent. Eye tracking data obtained from an independent sample of subjects (N = 110) showed that men looked longer than women at the chest area of the nude female actors in the film clips. These results indicate that visual sexual stimuli evoke discernible brain activity patterns in men and women which may reflect stronger attentional engagement with sexual stimuli in men than women.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.