Explaining sex differences in mental rotation: role of spatial activity experience (original) (raw)

Experiential Factors in Sex Differences on Mental Rotation

Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2003

Past research has shown that men score significantly higher than women on mental rotation tests. The present study examined the effects of a prior exposure to a mental rotation task, i.e., adapted Cube Comparison test, and to chreedimensional objects, i.e., LegosTM, on the performance on the Mental Rotation Test. 113 men and women were randomly divided into three conditions: control, exposure, or detailed instructions. On average, men outperformed women. Further analyses showed that sex differences were significant in the control condition but not in the other two, suggesting that a cuing effect may explain some of the robust sex differences in visuospatial tasks. Mental rotation capabilities vary from one individual to another. There are controversies about the way the research is conducted, the interpretation of the findings, and the theoretical and practical significance of the results. One of the most widely used tasks to assess mental rotation ability is Vandenberg and Kuse's Mental Rotation Test (1978), which is based on Shepard and Metzler's stimuli (1971). A considerable number of studies have shown that men outperform women on this task, indicating that men have a greater proficiency in the rotation of mental images (e.g., Campos & Cofan, 1986; Geary, Gilger, & Elliott-Miller, 1992; Masters, 1998). Although the task has been reported to yield some of the largest and most reliable sex differences in performance of all spatial tests (e.g.,

A note on sex differences in mental rotation in different age groups

Intelligence, 2008

A large number of studies have reported average performance differences in favor of males in mental rotation tasks. However, it is still unclear to what extent the magnitude of the sex differences varies across age, and whether the differences increase with age.

Sex differences in mental rotation: Top–down versus bottom–up processing

Neuroimage, 2006

Functional MRI during performance of a validated mental rotation task was used to assess a neurobiological basis for sex differences in visuospatial processing. Between-sex group analysis demonstrated greater activity in women than in men in dorsalmedial prefrontal and other high-order heteromodal association cortices, suggesting women performed mental rotation in an effortful, ''top -down'' fashion. In contrast, men activated primary sensory cortices as well as regions involved in implicit learning (basal ganglia) and mental imagery (precuneus), consistent with a more automatic, ''bottomup'' strategy. Functional connectivity analysis in association with a measure of behavioral performance showed that, in men (but not women), accurate performance was associated with deactivation of parieto-insular vestibular cortex (PIVC) as part of a visualvestibular network. Automatic evocation by men to a greater extent than women of this network during mental rotation may represent an effective, unconscious, bottom -up neural strategy which could reasonably account for men's traditional visuospatial performance advantage. D

Spatial anxiety mediates the sex difference in adult mental rotation test performance

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

Mental rotation ability is associated with successful advances in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and occupations. Meta-analyses have shown consistent sex disparities in mental rotation, where men outperform women on one measure of mental rotation ability, the Mental Rotations Test (MRT). Spatial anxiety, or the fear and apprehension felt when completing a task that requires spatial thinking, was proposed as a mechanism explaining the relation between sex and mental rotation test performance. This study modified the Spatial Anxiety Scale (SAS) to include questions about how anxious individuals feel when they must mentally rotate items to accomplish a task (e.g., playing Tetris). An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to assess the factorial structure of the modified spatial anxiety scale. Three factor loadings were extracted representing the ability to navigate, mentally rotate objects, and visualize objects. Furthermore, we analyzed the role...