Material below is adapted from the SfN Short Course session Sex Differences in Behavioral Strategies: Avoiding Interpretational Pitfalls, by Rebecca M. Shansky. Short Courses are daylong scientific trainings on emerging neuroscience topics and research techniques held the day before the start of SfN’s annual meeting.
Although scientists have studied animal behavior in the lab for years, most of those studies have been in male rodents. The NIH recently mandated that researchers must include both sexes in their experiments, meaning the ways scientists have done and interpreted studies for years are now getting another look. This shift to widely including both male and female animals in experimentation has already and will likely continue to provide insight into the relationship between brain structure and function, and should help to inform translational work.
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