Broverman’s model of cognitive sex differences.

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 So far,  most of the research on cognitive sex differences has been expressed in terms of a verbal superiority for females and a visuospatial superiority for males.    However,  sex differences in cognitive abilities could be classifiable in a larger scheme.    Broverman has proposed such a scheme (Broverman et al, 1974)   He believes women are superior at what he calls «automatized processing» whereas men excel at what he calls «perceptual restructuring».    This could help explain some of the apparent inconsistencies in current interpretation of cognitive sex differences,  some of which I have alluded to above.    Automatized processing consists of well practiced problem solving requiring little conscious attention.  Examples include speed reading,  color naming,  associative memory,  perceptual speed,  and many verbal functions.  Women seem to excel on these tasks.  Perceptual restructuring requires suppression of immediate automatized responses to the obvious properties of stimuli so as to access and disembed deeper relations.  Examples include disembedding tasks and backward counting.  Men seem to excel on such tasks.  It seems to me that this model helps explain why women perform as well as men on several  highly spatial tasks and why men perform as well as women on several verbal tasks (see the above sections for examples).  

Broverman thought that noradrenalin is a neurotransmitter which has a good chance of being sex-specific in humans.  Consequently,  he explored relations between various indicators of noradrenalin (peripheral and central) and the two cognitive ability types he thought were sexually «segregated».    He claimed that noradrenalin or agonists (ex: amphetamine) favor the automatized task performances and disfavor the perceptual restructuring performances while antagonists (ex: chlorpromazine) do the opposite.  

Broverman and other researchers then investigated the eventuality of a sex steroid modulation of the two cognitive ability types in question.   Males and females with high testosterone «stimulation» (high clearance of testosterone per unit of time) were weaker automatizers,  a finding confirmed by others.   Testosterone-related body traits also suggested the same relation.   However,  blood concentrations of testosterone, per se,  did not correlate with either automatization or perceptual restructuring,  and this negative finding has been replicated.    Finally,  testosterone was administered to normal subjects and the blood levels monitored.   The administration of testosterone per se only marginally influenced the cognitive ability types,  but clearance of the testosterone (pre-post treatment differences) did correlate quite significantly with the cognitive ability types.

The selection of tasks under the automatization rubric and under the perceptual restructuring rubric could be a matter of some discussion.   Optimized tasks for separating in a clear-cut manner the two ability types have not yet been devised.  Much of the pharmacological evidence presented by Broverman is very non specific to brain noradrenalin per se, and the endocrinological evidence is also indirect and controversial, so I think the model should be considered a working hypothesis at the present time.