The effect of menstrual cycle on attentional control

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Target identification is impaired by a salient distractor. It has been suggested that this impairment is caused by the temporal or spatial deviation of attentional focus from a task-relevant location to the distractor (attentional capture). The present study examined the effect of menstrual cycle on attentional capture for women across different phases of their menstrual cycle (the MP, FP, and LP). We collected saliva samples from women subjects for each experimental session to analyze estradiol and progesterone concentrations in the FP, LP and MP. The results indicate that robust attentional capture occurred in temporal and spatial search tasks. Attentional capture was more profound for women than men only in the temporal search task. This suggests that women are more sensitive to a salient but task-irrelevant item than men when they are searching for a target embedded among a rapid stream of nontargets. Importantly, the magnitude of attentional capture was unaffected by the metrual cycle. Theses results suggest that sex differences in attentional capture in the temporal search task result from physiological differences rather than sex hormones.