A recent meta-synthesis study with a sample of >12 million participants revealed that the male advantage in mental rotation (MR) is the largest cognitive sex/gender difference found in psychological literature. MR requires test takers to mentally rotate three-dimensional cubic figures under time restrictions. Previous studies have investigated…

Early life stress (ES) significantly increases predisposition to psychopathologies. Cannabinoids may cause cognitive deficits and exacerbate the effects of ES. Nevertheless, the endocannabinoid system has been suggested as a therapeutic target for the treatment of stress- and anxiety-related disorders. Here we examined whether cannabinoids…

Research has demonstrated that Long-Evans rats (LER) display superior mnemonic function over Wistar rats (WR). These differences are correlated with endogenous and input-dependent properties of the hippocampus. The present work sought to determine if juvenile pretraining might enhance hippocampal structural markers and if this would be associated…

In essentially every domain of neuroscience, the generally implicit assumption that few, if any, meaningful differences exist between male and female brain function is being challenged. Here we address how this development is influencing studies of the neurobiology of learning and memory. While it has been commonly held that males show an…

Gene transcription is required for long-term memory (LTM) formation. LTM formation is impaired in a male-specific manner in mice lacking either of the two Ca[superscript 2+] / calmodulin-dependent kinase kinase ("Camkk") genes. Since altered transcription was suggested to cause these impairments in LTM formation, we used microarrays to screen for…

Animal studies provided evidence that stress modulates multiple memory systems, favoring caudate nucleus-based "habit" memory over hippocampus-based "cognitive" memory. However, effects of stress on learning strategy and memory consolidation were not differentiated. We specifically address the effects of psychosocial stress on the applied learning…

The impact of a previously successful or unsuccessful experience on the subsequent acquisition of a related task is not well understood. The nature of past experience may have even greater impact in individuals with learning deficits, as their cognitive processes can be easily disrupted. Mice with a targeted disruption of the [alpha] and [delta]…