Hormonal contraceptives, menstrual cycle and brain response to faces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both behavioral and neuroimaging evidence support a female advantage in the perception of human faces. Here we explored the possibility that this relationship may be partially mediated by female sex hormones by investigating the relationship between the brain's response to faces and the use of oral contraceptives, as well as the phase of the menstrual cycle. First, functional magnetic resonance images were acquired in 20 young women [10 freely cycling and 10 taking oral contraception (OC)] during two phases of their cycle: mid-cycle and menstruation. We found stronger neural responses to faces in the right fusiform face area (FFA) in women taking oral contraceptives (vs freely cycling women) and during mid-cycle (vs menstruation) in both groups. Mean blood oxygenation level-dependent response in both left and right FFA increased as function of the duration of OC use. Next, this relationship between the use of OC and FFA response was replicated in an independent sample of 110 adolescent girls. Finally in a parallel behavioral study carried out in another sample of women, we found no evidence of differences in the pattern of eye movements while viewing faces between freely cycling women vs those taking oral contraceptives. The imaging findings might indicate enhanced processing of social cues in women taking OC and women during mid-cycle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".