Girls’ Stuff, boys’ stuff and mental rotation: fourth graders rotate faster with gender-congruent stimuli

Mental rotation: The effects of processing strategy, gender and task characteristics on children's accuracy, reaction time and eye movements’ pattern

“…Also, as expected, the gender effect size was higher at the difficult compared with the easy level. These finding support previous findings, showing that gender differences in MR exist already in childhood (e.g., 3 , 14 , 22 ), and increases with difficulty level ( 18 ).…”

“…The advantage of boys over girls will be more articulated in difficult compared to easy MR tasks. This hypothesis is based on earlier findings of Tzuriel and Egozi ( 3 , 14 ), Neuburger et al ( 15 ) and Ruthsatz et al ( 18 ).…”

“…When three-dimension familiar female- or male-stereotyped figures were used (e.g., doll and hairbrush as female familiar figures and train and tractor as male familiar figures), faster reaction time was reported in gender-congruent conditions (e.g., boys with male familiar figures and girls with female familiar figures). In addition, the analytical strategies might have been as efficient as holistic strategies for gender-familiar objects, but the use of holistic strategy resulted in faster reaction time for incongruent gender-object conditions ( 18 ). It is possible that as the difficulty level increases (e.g., incongruent gender-object) it is more difficult for children to verbalize and memorize the target properties and therefore a global perception might be more helpful.…”

“…Neuburger et al ( 15 ) reported that performance in MR tasks with familiar and concrete stimuli seems to improve to a greater degree between 8 and 10 years than the MR performance in tasks with unfamiliar and abstract stimuli. The conclusion is that different characteristics of the task and target can result in different strategies and in different behavioral performance children ( 18 ) and adults ( 13 ).…”

“…In addition, fourth-grade boys performed better than second grade boys in all stimulus conditions, whereas fourth-grade girls outperformed second-grade girls only in familiar figures. Ruthsatz et al ( 18 ) reported that gender differences among fourth-grade students, in favor of males appeared only at the difficult items but not at the easy items. It seems that across their life span, boys' improvement rate in MR is faster than girls' improvement rate, especially for difficult figures.…”