The influence of sex hormones on brain lateralization: Research Programme

Between and within sexes individuals differ in lateralization of brain and behaviour that might affect cognitive performance. There is long standing debate to what extent variation in lateralization is due to variation in early or late exposure to sex hormones. We will use two unique data sets to test this by 1) correlating existing data on prenatal hormone exposure with brain lateralization and cognitive performance in healthy children of 14-15 years; 2) analysing the association between brain lateralization and cognitive performance in transgender persons both before and after hormone treatment in childhood/puberty and adulthood, and in matched controls. Our focus is on lateralization of language production, mental rotation and facial emotion recognition. I will give you an overview of my research design.