These gender differences in P3 within age groups can be understood in the context of brain development. As noted earlier, there is evidence for sexual dimorphism of brain maturation (De Bellis et al., 2001; Lenroot et al., 2007; Lenroot and Giedd, 2010). Further, there is a substantial evidence of gender differences in brain connectivity that may account for gender-related cognitive differences (for a review, see Gong et al., 2011). For example, gender related connectivity differences within prefrontal cortex (PFC) showed that males exhibited stronger connectivity in the PFC regions with leftward dominance, while bilateral dominance was observed in females (Chuang and Sun, 2014). It is possible that individuals with familial/genetic risk for alcoholism may have a different developmental patterns within each gender than the normal/healthy individuals (Bava and Tapert, 2010), although this issue needs further exploration.
