Abstract
College men and women judged whether pairs of stimuli were identical or mirror images. One stimulus of a pair was presented upright; the other was rotated 0°–150° from the vertical. The stimuli were either alphanumeric symbols or unfamiliar letter-like characters of the type found on the Primary Mental Abilities Spatial Relations Test. For each individual, the linear function relating response latency to degree of rotation was computed. The slope of this function was steeper for women than for men. Further, the distribution of slopes was more variable among women, with approximately 30% falling outside the range of distribution for men. Women and men were quite similar in the accuracy of their judgments, the intercepts of the latency functions, and the precision with which the linear function characterized the latency data. It is suggested that the sex difference in the slope of the rotation function may reflect differences in strategies of mental rotation.
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References
Cooper, L. A., &Shepard, R. N. Chronometric studies of the rotation of mental images. In W. G. Chase (Ed.),Visual information processing. New York: Academic Press, 1973.
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This research was supported by grants to the first author from Sigma Xi and from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pittsburgh. It was also supported by the Learning Research and Development Center of the University of Pittsburgh, which is funded in part by the National Institute of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
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Kail, R., Carter, P. & Pellegrino, J. The locus of sex differences in spatial ability. Perception & Psychophysics 26, 182–186 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199867
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199867