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Updated: Jul 21, 2025

Sex Stratified Neuronal Cultures to Study Ischemic Cell Death Pathways
Published on: December 9, 2013
New perspectives on sex differences in learning and memory
Aaron W Fleischer1, Karyn M Frick1
1Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA.
Abstract:
Females have historically been disregarded in memory research, including the thousands of studies examining roles for the hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala in learning and memory. Even when included, females are often judged based on male-centric behavioral and neurobiological standards, generating and perpetuating scientific stereotypes that females exhibit worse memories compared with males in domains such as spatial navigation and fear. Recent research challenges these dogmas by identifying sex-specific strategies in common memory tasks. Here, we discuss rodent data illustrating sex differences in spatial and fear memory, as well as the neural mechanisms underlying memory formation. The influence of sex steroid hormones in both sexes is discussed, as is the importance to basic and translational neuroscience of studying sex differences.
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