Sex differences in object recognition are modulated by object similarity

Abstract

How females and males differ in performance in object recognition tasks appears to vary among mammalian species, with female superiority found in the laboratory rat and humans but not in the laboratory mouse. Here we assessed sex differences in object recognition in C57BL/J6 mice by varying the similarity between objects to be learned. Females outperformed males in object recognition when the novel object was similar to a previously learned object.