Cognitive Control Advantage And Its Neural Mechanism In Women's Mid-luteal Phase

As a unique physiological phenomenon of women,the regularity changes of endogenous hormones in the menstrual cycle have a very important impact on women's health and fertility.In recent years,many researchers have found that the menstrual cycle also has a non-negligible impact on women's cognitive ability and social behaviors.For example,compared with the mid-luteal phases,during the late follicular phase,women augment the ornamental behaviors,seek immediate rewards,increase activities etc.But little researches focus on the mid-luteal phase.According to the “Parent Investment Theory”,women in the mid-luteal phase are in the incubation state,have the requirements to improve the self-inhibition ability,including suppressing aggression and getting along with allies,restraining their own needs and putting infants' needs first,restraining timely enjoyment and choosing behaviors more suitable for survival.Accomplishment these behavior requires cognitive control ability.These leads to the hypothesis that,compared with the late follicular phase,the mid-luteal phase should have a general cognitive control advantage in the process of completing cognitive tasks.Based on the Norman-Shallice cognitive model,cognitive control has three aspects: selecting and shifting attention;solving conflicts and response inhibition;weighing and decision-making of tasks.In order to verify the above hypothesis,six experiments were designed in this study.Using the fMRI technology found evidences for the cognitive control advantage in the mid-luteal phase from the resting-state and the three cognitive control aspects.Firstly,using fMRI resting state technology,from the resting-state brain network,investigated whether the mid-luteal phase had the physiological basis for the cognitive control advantage(Study 1,Experiment 1).The later researches was carried out with the task-state fMRI technology.Study 2 included two experiments,using perceptual threshold measurement(Experiment 2)and visual cueing paradigm(Experiment 3),to examine women specific attentional selecting advantage and augmented attentional shifting ability during the mid-luteal phase.Study 3 included two experiments,using implicit association test paradigm(Experiment 4)and classical Strop paradigm(Experiment 5),investigated the enhanced self-response inhibition ability towards social and non-social cues in the mid-luteal phase;In the Study 4,intertemporal decision-making paradigm(Experiment 6)was used to examine compared with the late follicular phase,how women in the mid-luteal phase used cognitive control ability to trade-off between the sooner rewards and later rewards.For the results of the resting state networks,compared with the late follicular phase,women during the mid-luteal phase activated the superior frontal gyrus and parietal cortex,which belong to the cognitive executive brain network.In the analysis of the relationship between female hormones and brain activation patterns,it was found that the activation of parietal cortex in female brain executive network increased with the increase of progesterone level.The behavior results showed that,in the visual cueing task,the mid-luteal phase showed faster attention-shift speed;in the implicit association test,the mid-luteal phase had universality in promoting the response speed of all associative tests containing cognitive conflicts;in the Stroop task,the mid-luteal phase had shorter response time;in the intertemporal decision-making tasks,women during the mid-luteal phase had a lower discount rate.At the level of brain mechanism,compared with the late follicular phase,women in the mid-luteal phase recruited more brain regions related to cognitive control and response inhibition,including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,medial prefrontal cortex,inferior frontal gyrus,superior parietal lobe and inferior parietal lobe.In the inspection of cognitive dopamine pathway,women in the mid-luteal phase were more likely to enhance the activation of dorsal striatum-prefrontal cortex pathway compared with the late follicular phase.These results showed a cognitive control advantage in women's mid-luteal phase when compared with the late follicular phase.These results verified the hypotheses proposed in this paper,and provided evidence for the Parental Investment Theory.There are also some deficiencies in this study.For example,the cognitive control advantage in the mid-luteal phase was only compared with the late follicular phase;lack of dopamine level measurements,it was not possible to determine how the interaction between the endogenous hormones and the dopamine,which might be responsible for the cognitive control advantage during the mid-luteal phase.Future research could use more diverse experimental methods to explore the relationship between female hormones and the cognitive control ability.