Equivalence of male and female performance on a tactuospatial maze

Abstract

Sex differences in performance of a tactuospatial finger-maze task were assessed in 28 male and 32 female right-handed college undergraduates. The subjects performed the task with their nondominant left hand, and were trained to one error-free trial within specified time limits. Cognitive tests were administered to assess vocabulary, word fluency, and spatial relations capabilities. The results failed to indicate any significant sex differences in performance on the tactuospatial maze in terms of mean errors, number of trials, and trial latencies, or on any of the cognitive tests. The findings strengthen proposals that male superiority in spatial ability may not be as substantial as commonly accepted, and that sex differences in performance may depend on the particular components of spatial ability that are measured in specific tasks.According to some recent reviews (Caplan, MacPherson, & Tobin, 1985;Linn & Peterson, 1985), the reputed male advantage in spatial ability may be limited to some visuospatial tasks . The variety of tasks employed to measure spatial ability has yielded much inconsistent data. For example, both the Porteus Maze Test and the Standardized Road-Map Test of Direction Sense assess visuospatial ability but have produced contradictory and noncorrelated results (Caplan et al., 1985). Similarly, studies that have examined sex differences in performance of different tasks requiring tactuospatial functioning have resulted in inconsistent data : male superiority has been noted in some cases (e.g., Dawson, 1981), but no sex differences or even a female advantage has been found in others (e.g., Biersner, 1980). This study presents additional data regarding sex differences in the performance of a tactuospatial task . MEmODSubjects Twenty-eight male and 32 female right-handed psychology students at Memphis State University participated as subjects for extra credit; the task had been described as involving a manual learning task and some written tests. Test Materials and ApparatusThe Lateral Dominance Questionnaire (Lawson, Goldstein, & Musty, 1975) assesses theperformance of 12 tasks with the dominant hand (8), foot (2), or eye (2). Lateralization of 8 or more items to the right was required for subjects to be classified as right-handed ; these subjects also had identified themselves as right-handed and wrote with the right hand.A plywood finger-maze that measured approximately 27 cm long, 21 cm wide , and 2 ern thick was used to examine tactuospatial performance . One pathway with 5 cul-de-sacs led from start-to goalbox . The pathway and the circular start-and goalboxes were approximately 2 cm and 3 cm wide, respectively .The abbreviated Shipley Vocabulary Test (Shipley, 1967), the Verbal Fluency Test (Thurstone, 1962), and the Spatial Relations subtest of the Differential Aptitude Tests (OAT ; Bennett, Seashore, & WesCorrespondence may be addressed to Jeannette P. Ward, Department of Psychology, Memphis State Univers ity, Memphis, TN 38052 . man, 1974) were employed to assess the subjects' cognitive...

Intermanual transfer effects in sequential tactuomotor learning: Evidence for effector independent coding

“…With respect to gender effects, men and women performed our maze task at the same level, corroborating findings by Alvis et al (1989) and Parlow and Kinsbourne (1990). Because the number of left and right-handed women and men was not equally divided in each group, we were not able to test the effect of handedness as well.…”

“…Additionally, there are also studies that report intermanual symmetry, with transfer to the dominant hand being similar to transfer to the non-dominant hand (Piccirilli, Finali, & Sciarma, 1989;Mandal, Singh, Asthana, & Srivastava, 1992;Rand, Hikosaka, Miyachi, Lu, & Miyashita, 1998;Schulze, Lüders, & Jäncke, 2002). Intermanual transfer effects have also been found to be dependent on handedness (Stoddard & Vaid, 1996;Schmidt, Oliveira, Rocha, & Abreu-Villaca, 2000) and gender (Schmidt et al, 2000), although also for these effects studies have been reported that found no differences between right-and left-handed participants (Mandal et al, 1992;Yamauchi, Imanaka, Nakayama, & Nishizawa, 2004) or between males and females (Alvis, Ward, & Dodson, 1989;Parlow & Kinsbourne, 1990).…”

The world is not flat: Can people reorient using slope?

“…Similarly, women's greater overestimation of hill slants is eliminated under haptic conditions (Proffitt et al, 1995). Furthermore, it has been shown that, in a tactuospatial finger-maze task, women perform equally to (Alvis, Ward, & Dodson, 1989) or better than (Biersner, 1980) men, and that, in a kinesthetic acuity task, men outperform women only if visual cues are added (Livesey & Intili, 1996). Finally, studies on samples of sighted blindfolded and blind participants show no sex differences in way finding (Passini, Proulx, & Rainville, 1990) or mental rotation (Marmor & Zaback, 1976).…”

The Role of Slope in Human Reorientation

“…For most of these differences, there is an advantage in favor of males. However, there is evidence in support of a lack of sex differences in non--visual tasks [2], [17], [18], [19]. One interpretation of these data would suggest that men might have an advantage with visuo--spatial tasks, rather than with spatial tasks per se.…”