From early implementations of the test, sex differences were evident with females outperforming males and mobilizing fewer brain resources as indicated by more circumscribed activation in fMRI (Gur et al., 2002). This sex difference seems to extend to other social cognition tasks. For example, in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC), a population based sample of youth ages 8–21 (Calkins et al., 2014; Gur et al., 2012), a comprehensive computerized neurocognitive battery (CNB, Gur et al., 2010) showed sex differences in cognitive performance where some domains (e.g., verbal memory) were performed more accurately and faster by females, others more accurately and faster by males (e.g., spatial processing), yet for other tests, one sex was faster and the other more accurate (e.g., attention, working memory). For the social cognition tests, which included emotion identification, emotion intensity differentiation and age differentiation, females performed more accurately and were faster on all tests (Roalf et al., 2014).
