Sex is predicted by spatial memory multivariate activation patterns

Whether sex differences exist in the brain at the macroscopic level, as measured with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is a topic of debate. The present spatial long-term memory functional MRI (fMRI) study predicted sex based on event-related patterns of brain activity. Within spatial memory regions of interest, patterns of activity associated with females and males were used to predict the sex of each member of left-out female–male pairs at above-chance accuracy. The current results provide evidence for sex differences in the brain processes underlying spatial long-term memory. This is the first time that sex has been predicted using event-related fMRI activation patterns. The present findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that there are functional and anatomic sex differences in the brain and, more broadly, question the widespread practice of collapsing across sex in the field of cognitive neuroscience.