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The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between hormone contraceptive use and menstruation on cognitive performance in young women. The object array task assessed object memory and a mental rotations test assessed spatial ability in women taking hormone contraceptives and naturally cycling women. Women taking hormone contraceptives were significantly better than naturally cycling women at identifying novel objects on an object array, but not on performance of a mental rotations task. There were also no significant differences in either task between naturally cycling women who were menstruating and those who were not menstruating during testing. The results of this study suggest that women taking hormone contraceptives outperformed naturally cycling women in recalling the identities of objects. The findings from this study help to further demonstrate the relationship between ovarian hormones and cognitive performance and add to the understanding of how hormone contraceptives affect cognition.

The authors sought to determine how different elements of enrichment, for example, cognitive stimulation and voluntary exercise, differ in their ability to improve memory throughout the lifespan. Young, middle-aged, and aged female C57BL/6 mice received 24-hr exposure in their home cages to toys alone (cognitive stimulation), running wheels alone (exercise), or both toys and running wheels (complex enrichment) for 4 weeks prior to and then throughout spatial water maze testing. As expected, spatial memory became progressively worse with age. Exercise alone improved spatial water maze performance in young mice, whereas both exercise alone and complex enrichment improved spatial maze performance in middle-aged mice. All enrichment treatments improved spatial maze performance in aged mice. These data suggest that exercise is the most effective element of enrichment in young female mice and that both cognitive stimulation and exercise are necessary to reliably improve spatial water maze performance in aging female mice. Keywords: environmental enrichment, aging, reference memory, spatial memory, Morris water maze