ReviewPhysiology & behavior2018
Fast, furious and enduring: Sensitive versus critical periods in sexual differentiation of the brain.
Review in Physiology & behavior, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 105 citations in OpenAlex.
- Timing of peripubertal steroid exposure predicts visuospatial cognition in men: Evidence from three samples.Hormones and behavior · 2020Pooled it
- Sexual Orientation and Cognitive Ability: A Multivariate Meta-Analytic Follow-Up.Archives of sexual behavior · 2020Pooled it
- Social Cognition in Adolescents with Gender Dysphoria and Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: A Preliminary Investigation of Biological vs. Experiential Gender EffectsJournal of clinical research in pediatric endocrinology · 2026Article
- Elevated maternal testosterone induces sex-specific neurodevelopmental changes and ASD-related behavioral phenotypes in rat offspring.Pediatric research · 2026Article
- The Spectrum of Sex and Gender.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Excess Neonatal Testosterone Causes Male-Specific Social and Fear Memory Deficits in Wild-Type Mice.eNeuro · 2025Article
- The role of neonatal kisspeptin in long-term social behavior in mammals.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Sex differences in brain-behavior relationships in the first 2 years of life.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Cumulative risk assessment as the pathway to public health protection for behavioral neurotoxicity.Neurotoxicology · 2025Review
- A P2RY12 deficiency results in sex-specific cellular perturbations and sexually dimorphic behavioral anomalies.Journal of neuroinflammation · 2024Article
- Gonadal hormones impart male-biased behavioral vulnerabilities to immune activation via microglial mitochondrial function.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2024Article
- Pain mechanisms in the transgender individual: a review.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Epigenetic mechanisms underlying sex differences in the brain and behavior.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- Why and How to Account for Sex and Gender in Brain and Behavioral Research.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Prenatal androgen influences on the brain: A review, critique, and illustration of research on congenital adrenal hyperplasia.Journal of neuroscience research · 2023Review
- Role of estrogen in women's Alzheimer's disease risk as modified by APOE.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2023Review
- Effects of prenatal opioid exposure on synaptic adaptations and behaviors across development.Neuropharmacology · 2023Review
- Developmental patterning of peptide transcription in the central circadian clock in both sexes.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Toward reframing brain-social dynamics: current assumptions and future challenges.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Understanding critical periods in brain development and how they impact adult functioning is a primary goal of neuroscience. The sexual differentiation of the brain is a unique critical period in that it is initiated by endogenous production of a critical signaling molecule in only one sex, testosterone in fetal males. Females, by contrast, do not produce testosterone but are highly responsive to it and remain sensitive to its masculinizing effects well past the close of the critical period in males. Compared to other well characterized critical periods, such as those for the visual system or barrel cortex, the masculinization of the brain is telescoped into a few short days and initiated prenatally. The slightly longer and postnatal sensitive period in females provides a valuable tool for understanding this challenging but fundamental developmental process.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.