Adolescence is typically defined as the developmental stage occurring between puberty and legal adulthood and varies between individuals. Most developmental imaging studies, however, have used a cut-off of age 13 and above to define adolescence as opposed to childhood that is usually considered to reach ages up to 12 years. Sex differences become more pronounced during this period of adolescence, concomitant with the hormonal changes of puberty [18] with females being more efficient than males in tasks of selective attention, verbal fluency and conductive reasoning [2, 16], and males outperforming females in cognitive functions that rely on visual–spatial processing, especially mental rotation [1, 19].
