ArticleScientific reports2020
Male sexual orientation, gender nonconformity, and neural activity during mental rotations: an fMRI study.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A systematic review of the neural correlates of sexual minority stress: towards an intersectional minority mosaic framework with implications for a future research agenda.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2022Pooled it
- Structural, Functional, and Metabolic Brain Differences as a Function of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation: A Systematic Review of the Human Neuroimaging Literature.Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Pooled it
- Stimulus-specific influence of gender on mental-rotation-related brain activity.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Biodevelopmental Correlates of Sexual Orientation in Men: Evidence from a Polish Sample.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- White Matter Microstructure Among Straight and Gay Cisgender Men, Sao Praphet Song, and Straight Cisgender Women in Thailand.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Sport training of axial rotation affects spatial ability: Evidence from behavior and fNIRS.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Early Female Transgender Identity after Prenatal Exposure to Diethylstilbestrol: Report from a French National Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Cohort.Journal of xenobiotics · 2024Article
- Sex and gender correlates of sexually polymorphic cognition.Biology of sex differences · 2024Article
- Giftedness and atypical sexual differentiation: enhanced perceptual functioning through estrogen deficiency instead of androgen excess.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2024Review
- Carving the Biodevelopment of Same-Sex Sexual Orientation at Its Joints.Archives of sexual behavior · 2023Article
- Accurate machine learning prediction of sexual orientation based on brain morphology and intrinsic functional connectivity.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Medial Prefrontal Cortex Activity to Reward Outcome Moderates the Association Between Victimization Due to Sexual Orientation and Depression in Youth.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The cross-sex shift hypothesis predicts that gay men should perform more like heterosexual women on important neurocognitive tasks on which men score higher than women, such as mental rotation. Studies also suggest sex differences exist in the neural correlates of mental rotation. However, no studies have taken sexual orientation into account or considered within-group variation attributable to recalled gender nonconformity (a developmental trait reliably associated with human nonheterosexuality). We quantified the neural correlates of mental rotation by comparing two groups of gay men, gender conforming (n = 23) and gender nonconforming (n = 23), to gender conforming heterosexual men (n = 22) and women (n = 22). We observed a sex difference between heterosexual men and women in the premotor cortex/supplementary motor cortex and left medial superior frontal gyrus. We also observed a sex difference as well as a cross-sex shift in gay men who recalled being gender nonconforming as children in the right superior frontal gyrus, right angular gyrus, right amygdala/parahippocampal gyrus, and bilaterally in the middle temporal gyrus and precuneus. Thus, cross-sex shifts may be associated with underlying developmental factors which are associated with sexual orientation (such as gender nonconformity). The results also suggest that gay men should not be studied as a homogenous group.
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