An early sex difference in the relation between mental rotation and object preference

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that males outperform females on mental rotation tasks as early as infancy. Sex differences in object preference have also been shown to emerge early in development and precede sex-typed play in childhood. Although research with adults and older children is suggestive of a relationship between play preferences and visuospatial abilities, including mental rotation, little is known about the developmental origins of this relationship. The present study compared mental rotation ability and object preference in 6- to 13-month-old infants. We used a novel paradigm to examine individual differences in infants’ mental rotation abilities as well as their differential preference for one of two sex-typed objects. A sex difference was found on both tasks, with boys showing an advantage in performance on the mental rotation task and exhibiting greater visual attention to the male-typed object (i.e., a toy truck) than to the female-typed object (i.e., a doll) in comparison to girls. Moreover, we found a relation between mental rotation and object preference that varied by sex. Greater visual interest in the male-typed object was related to greater mental rotation performance in boys, but not in girls. Possible explanations related to perceptual biases, prenatal androgen exposure, and experiential influences for this sex difference are discussed.

Spatial thinking in infancy: Origins and development of mental rotation between 3 and 10 months of age

“…… This possibility would be consistent with a sex difference, but not one that reflects an ability of male but not female infants to mentally rotate figures" (2016, p. 5-6). The Lauer et al (2015) finding that female infants preferred displays containing mirror-images over displays containing only nonmirror-images (though significantly less than did male infants) is consistent with the possibility that female infants are capable of MR, even if they do not consistently provide evidence of that competence.…”

“…In seven out of eight of these cases, male infants on average have responded in significantly different ways to familiar versus mirror-image objects, whereas female infants on average have consistently treated these objects similarly. Although the data from the eighth study (Lauer et al, 2015) indicated that both male and female infants discriminated non-mirror from mirror-image objects, a main effect of sex still indicated that boys spent significantly more time than girls looking at displays containing mirror-image objects. Thus, in the studies that have detected sex differences to date, all eight have revealed effects in the same direction, in favor of males.…”

“…Early work on rotating objects did not reveal sex differences (Hespos & Rochat, 1997;Mash et al, 2007;Rochat & Hespos, 1996), but both of the first studies of MR that required infants to recognize a rotated object and discriminate it from its mirror image reported a sex difference favoring males (Moore & Johnson, 2008;Quinn & Liben, 2008). Since then, three additional studies in our labs (Constantinescu et al, 2018;Moore & Johnson, 2011; and three additional studies in three other labs (Kaaz & Heil, 2019;Lauer et al, 2015;Quinn & Liben, 2014) have reported a male advantage in MR in infants 10 months of age or younger. In contrast to these eight studies, two studies in our labs (Christodoulou et al, 2016;Slone et al, 2018) and six studies in three other labs (Erdmann et al, 2018;Gerhard & Schwarzer, 2018;Schwarzer et al, 2013, b) have reported no sex differences in infants from this age range.…”

“…Using a VoE paradigm, Möhring and Frick (2013) found evidence of MR in 6-month-olds, but only in 6-month-olds who had previously been given an opportunity to manually explore an object before being tested with it. Likewise, Lauer, Udelson, Jeon, and Lourenco (2015) reported that infants as young as 6 months can form mental representations of the orientation of a 2D object and use those mental representations to discriminate the object from its mirror image, a finding these researchers considered convergent evidence for MR competence in infancy.…”

Who Benefits from An Intervention Program on Foundational Skills for Handwriting Addressed to Kindergarten Children and First Graders?

“…Moreover, in large sample studies, female children have been found to outperform males in fine motor skills, an important predictor of writing skills, still during preschool years [49][50][51]. On the other hand, research has consistently found a gender gap in children's visual-spatial skills, with boys outperforming girls [52][53][54][55], and these differences remain stable throughout adulthood, especially for mental rotation tasks, as attested from different meta-analyses studies [56,57]. Visual-spatial skills have important implications for future success and achievement.…”