Gender Differences In Hemispheric Transmission During Perceptual Processing Of Chinese Characters

The interhemispheric transmission is the basic mechanism of visual perception processing.One important indicator of hemispheric communication is the time it takes for information to cross the corpus callosum,i.e.,the interhemispheric transfer time(IHTT).Several studies have found that there is a transfer time advantage from the right to left hemisphere for the visual stimuli.In recent years,researches on the IHTT of words and faces have proposed the right to left advantages of transfer time is related to hemispheric specialization and the gender of the subjects,i.e.,males’ transfer time from non-dominant hemisphere to dominant hemisphere is shorter than the opposite direction,while females’ transfer time in both directions are more symmetrical,which means that they do not show the IHTT advantage in a particular direction.Chinese character is a kind of typical stimulus with the specialization of the left hemisphere during early perceptual processing,and the study found that there are different hemispheric advantages in Chinese character processing between males and females,but it is unclear whether there exist gender differences in the hemispheric transmission of Chinese characters.More importantly,there has been no systematic discussion on the interhemispheric transmission of visual stimulus.Therefore,this study uses faces and houses as control stimulus,and a red fixation detection task to explore the gender differences in the hemispheric transmission in the early perception processing of Chinese characters via split-field rapid presentation paradigm and EEG technology.The present study uses the latency of N170 as an indicator of interhemispheric transfer time(N170-IHTT)to explored this scientific problem through a series of experiments.In Experiment 1,we adopt a classic split-field rapid presentation paradigm,and recruit college students as research subjects to explore the gender differences in hemispheric transmission of Chinese characters;In experiment 2,we use the same paradigm and task to explore the gender differences in hemispheric transmission of inverted Chinese characters;Experiment 3 combines the adaptation paradigm and the split-field rapid sequential presentation paradigm,to explore whether the gender difference in hemispheric transmission of Chinese characters is modulated by the adaptation effect.The research results are as follows:(1)There is a gender difference in N170 in the early perceptual processing of Chinese characters.Compared with females,males have longer N170 latency for Chinese character processing,but shorter N170-IHTT;no similar results occur in faces and houses.This suggests the category specificity of Chinese characters in IHTT’s gender differences.(2)The study found that the IHTT dominant effect from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere was consistent among the three types of stimuli,namely,Chinese characters,faces and houses,which shows that the directional superiority effect of IHTT is stable in different stimuli and different tasks.(3)The N170-IHTT of face processing is shorter than Chinese characters and houses,which indicates that the hemispheric transfer time is modulated by the stimulus category and has face category specificity.(4)There are N170 adaptation effects of faces on the early perceptual processing of Chinese characters under the condition of split-field presentation;however,the adaptive effects of faces and Chinese characters on Chinese characters are not shown on IHTT,which suggests that the adaptation effects of stimuli are more reflected in terms of activation intensity of the N170 component.In summary,this study found that there are gender differences in the interhemispheric transmission during early perceptual processing of Chinese characters,and IHTT is modulated by the category of stimulus.These findings promote the understanding of the perceptual processing mechanism of brain.