An Effect of Menstrual Cycle Phase on Episodic Memory

Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology Subjects: Physics >> General Physics: Statistical and Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Information, etc. submitted time 2021-11-13

李建花 解佳佳 庄锦英

Abstract： " Episodic memory refers to the recollection of personally experienced events in a specific context. Evolutionary psychology findings have suggested that female sex hormones may be important influencing factors for episodic memory, but the specific mechanism underlying these influences are unclear. The aim of the present study was to examine whether periodic fluctuations of estrogen and progesterone over the menstrual cycle may influence episodic memory in the What-Where-When Task. Healthy women with stable menstrual cycles and not taking exogenous hormones were recruited for two experiments. In Experiment 1, episodic memory was tested with 33 women during the late follicular phase (FP) and during the mid-luteal phase (LP) with the following five tasks employing images of objects as stimuli: object-only, position-only, object-position binding, object-order binding, and position-order binding. The testing order was counter-balanced across subjects. After a learning phase, participants were asked to recollect elements according to the requirements of each task, and the accuracy rates of their recollections were recorded as dependent variables. The results of Experiment 1 showed that recollection accuracy differed between the late FP and mid-LP for only one of the tasks, namely the position-order binding task. Thus, in Experiment 2, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the performance of the position-order binding task, while recollection accuracy performance was evaluated. For the position-order binding task in both experiments, a significantly higher response accuracy rate was observed in the mid-LP than in the late FP. Regarding the ERP results, amplitudes of the P300 component and the late positive component (LPC) in frontal cortices, which has associated with cognitive control, were found to be higher in the mid-LP than in the late FP. The present results support the notion that people may have greater cognitive control of episodic memory in the mid-LP than in the late FP. In conclusion, the present results showed that menstrual cycle phase affects position-order binding memory performance and concomitant neural activities. Better episodic memory performance during the mid-LP, relative to the late FP, could be attributed to better cognitive control ability. This study provides new information on physiological factors that can affect episodic memory.

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

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