Gender-bias in the sensory representation of infant cry

Abstract

The auditory neural pathway in females appears to be more sensitive to the cry of an infant (De Pisapia et al., 2013; Messina et al., 2016). Cortical responses in females have shown a distinct advantage compared to males in the auditory processing of infant cry. Such gender-bias in the cortical responses might emanate either at higher levels of processing such as cognitive and emotional processing or at the lower level representation of stimulus features. We assessed for a difference if any, between the two genders, in the sensory representation of an infant’s cry. We used frequency following responses (FFR) to assess the sensory representation of an infant cry. This was done in sixteen male and fifteen female non-parent adults. The FFR closely mimics the stimulus acoustics with fine temporal precision and is the measure of choice to assess the sensory encoding of sounds in the auditory system. We performed spectral analysis of the FFRs and compared the spectral magnitudes between males and females. We found significantly higher FFR spectral magnitudes in females compared to males. The gender differences found were not related to the confounding variables such as head size or differences in the volume-conducting media. By systematically controlling other influencing variables, we show that the bias in neural processing of infant cry in females emerges right at the sensory representation levels.