Dr. Juraska will continue her work on sex differences in the rat cerebral cortex. These structures are important for understanding the basis of cognitive learning abilities. She will combine neuroanatomical analyses with perinatal hormonal manipulations to investigate how widespread sex differences are in mammalian brain, how hormones influence the development of sex differences, and the implications of sex differences for normal brain function. There are dramatic sex differences in developmental pathologies such as the learning disorder dyslexia, and it has been suggested that testosterone in early development may play a role in this syndrome. Dr. Juraska will also examine the possibility of sex differences in the connectivity of the cortex by mapping the distribution of neurons that project through the corpus callosum, the major track that connects the right and left hemispheres. Her results will have important implications for understanding the importance of lateralization and its relationship to possible sex differences in verbal and spatial learning abilities in humans.
