Women Lead New Neuroscience Research on Empathy, Pareidolia and Mental Rotation

Women remain under-represented at the senior levels of neuroscience despite forming the majority of students entering the field, and a newly published editorial in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience argues that research led by women can help correct both the career imbalance and the scientific blind spots it creates. The editorial, by Nayara Mota of the Federal University of Bahia and Anna Ilona Roberts of the University of Wrocław, introduces the second installment of the Research Topic “Women in interacting minds and brains,” published in the journal’s Social and Affective Neurosciences section. Rather than a single study, the piece frames a collection of female-led investigations spanning social cognition, perception and neurophysiology, and it situates that collection within a documented, persistent pattern of attrition for women in the discipline.

The scale of that pattern is laid out in stark numerical terms. The editorial notes that the Society for Neuroscience documented the disparity fourteen years ago: women made up 56 percent of students entering graduate training in neuroscience, but only 29 percent of tenure-track faculty and 23 percent of full professors, with little change in senior representation since 2000. Contemporary evidence, the authors write, suggests the gradient persists. From 2002 to 2020, women accounted for 36.2 percent of first authors but only 24.6 percent of last authors in PubMed-indexed neurological publications.

The disparities extend beyond authorship metrics. Among neurology researchers, the editorial reports, women were less likely to be full professors than men, at 18 percent versus 39 percent. Women in that population also reported greater nonprofessional responsibilities and lower satisfaction with work-life balance, and they perceived their institutional climates as less equitable. Qualitative evidence adds further texture to the picture, identifying barriers that include limited access to women mentors, under-representation of women in senior positions, competing family responsibilities, disparities in compensation and promotion, and experiences of bias and harassment. Taken together, the authors argue, these findings indicate that gender disparities in neuroscience extend beyond entry into the field to sustained progression toward scientific leadership.

Why does this matter for the science itself, and not only for the scientists? The editorial advances a methodological argument: by focusing on research led by women, the Research Topic contributes to changing the current neuroscientific landscape. Beyond reducing gender inequality in science, greater representation of women in neuroscientific research may broaden theoretical and methodological approaches and help reduce potential biases in research questions, objects of study and interpretations of neuroscientific evidence. The authors add that differences in neurocognitive and neurophysiological processing between women and men, highlighted by some contributions to the collection, may be embedded in social and cultural differences, and that greater diversity among researchers may broaden perspectives and counterbalance biases arising from predominantly male authorship.

The collection pursues two complementary directions, according to the editorial: presenting scientific contributions led by women, and highlighting sex- and gender-related differences in neurocognitive and neurophysiological processes, whether or not those differences are mediated by social factors. On the first front, the research led by women in the collection places particular emphasis on the social dimensions of human neuroscience. One study, led by Chin and colleagues, incorporated empathy into the analysis of individual differences in brain responses to robot and human pain, a question at the intersection of social neuroscience and human-robot interaction research.

The findings from that study are technically striking. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, a non-invasive optical technique that measures hemodynamic activity in the cortex, the researchers found that prefrontal cortical hemodynamic responses to robot pain were equivalent to those elicited by human pain. Yet the absence of a difference in the fNIRS measures did not mean participants were blind to the distinction: they were able to verbally discriminate robot pain faces from neutral ones, and also from human pain faces.

A second female-led contribution, by Roberts and Roberts, moves the social dimension of the collection into evolutionary territory. The work highlights social bonding and social identity as important dynamics developed through food culture among primates, just as they are in human groups. Building on an integrated theoretical model of dietary traditions and primate social complexity, the study offers an evolutionary perspective on how culture integrates biological and social demands. In doing so, it frames food-related traditions not merely as foraging behavior but as a scaffold for the social identities and bonds that structure primate, and human, group life.

Three further studies in the collection collectively examine sex- and gender-related differences across complementary levels of analysis: behavioral testing, event-related potentials and magnetoencephalography. The editorial emphasizes that all three adopt original approaches, investigating uncommon and innovative objects of study such as pareidolia, mental rotation and motor imagery, or “visualization,” while characterizing the underlying mental processes as a theoretical foundation for interpreting behavioral, ERP and MEG measures. The first, by Çamcı and colleagues, investigated gender attribution to ambiguous faces in patients receiving emergency medical care. A substantial 81 percent of the pareidolia faces were categorized as male, and this pattern was consistent across both male and female patients. Male patients were therefore more likely to perceive ambiguous faces as congruent with their own gender, whereas female patients showed the opposite pattern, with the dominant attribution incongruent with their own gender.

Intriguingly, the Çamcı study found a dissociation between what patients judged and how quickly they judged it. Although attributions of male gender dominated in frequency, patients were significantly faster at attributing a female gender to the ambiguous pareidolia faces, at 1.44 seconds, than a male gender, at 3.25 seconds. The editorial notes that this discrepancy invites further investigation of how automatic visual processing interacts with social and cultural expectations in gender attribution during pareidolia. Frequency and speed, in other words, need not tell the same story about the perceptual and social mechanisms at work when the brain assigns a gender to an ambiguous stimulus.

The remaining two contributions shift from behavior to neurophysiology. A narrative review led by Nanova synthesizes event-related potential evidence on sex-related differences in mental rotation in young adults, particularly during demanding behavioral 3D tasks. The review highlights that these behavioral differences are accompanied by differences in ERP amplitude, latency, global field power and scalp topography. Notably, Nanova observes that neurophysiological differences may occur even when behavioral performance is comparable, suggesting that accuracy and response time alone may not fully capture sex-related differences in the neurocognitive processes underlying mental rotation. Finally, Potts and colleagues examined motor imagery in elite female ice hockey players using exclusively non-behavioral measures in a MEG study. The authors identified, even at the individual level, a principal hub of neural activity during the imagery condition in a posterior left-hemisphere cortical region surrounding the intraparietal sulcus. The editorial calls for further studies to expand the neurocognitive interpretation of such MEG results and to investigate gender-specific aspects of motor imagery in light of cultural factors and prior experience. Together, the editors conclude, these female-led studies embody the dual mission of the Research Topic: elevating the visibility of women leading rigorous neuroscientific investigation while advancing how sex and gender are conceptualized, measured and interpreted in modern neuroscience.

Subject of Research: An editorial introducing a Research Topic of female-led neuroscience studies on social cognition and sex- and gender-related differences in brain and behavior.

Article Title: Editorial: Women in interacting minds and brains II

Article References: Mota, N., & Roberts, A. I. (2026). Editorial: Women in interacting minds and brains II. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 20, Article 2001078. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2026.2001078

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2026.2001078

Keywords: women in neuroscience, gender disparity, social neuroscience, face pareidolia, mental rotation, motor imagery, fNIRS, ERP, magnetoencephalography, human-robot interaction, primate food culture, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience