Sex differences in latent inhibition and their implications for psychotic disorders

Sex differences in latent inhibition (LI) are predominantly inconclusive and conflicting across human and rodent studies, with clearer evidence emerging when LI is perturbed by factors like drugs or oestrous phase.

• Why it matters: LI is linked to aberrant salience attribution relevant to hallucinations and delusions in psychosis, yet sex differences in LI have been poorly characterized.
• What they did: A systematic review synthesized human and rodent LI evidence, and additional rodent data assessed sex differences in contextual fear conditioning LI alongside hippocampal gene expression.
• The result: Interactions between sex and perturbing factors suggest sex differences in vulnerability to LI perturbations, and rodent findings indicate sex-linked hippocampal processing differences at both behavioral and neurobiological levels.