On gender differences in mental rotation processing speed

From What Age Is Mental Rotation Training Effective? Differences in Preschool Age but Not in Sex

“…Another objective of this present study was to analyze possible differences between sex 1 groups at such early stages of development. Numerous previous studies have consistently shown sex differences in MR, with a greater group average performance for men compared to women within the adult population ( Reilly and Neumann, 2013 ; Debelak et al, 2014 ; Voyer and Jansen, 2016 ). In this sense, Linn and Petersen (1985) , in their meta-analysis, established significant mean differences between sex groups in MR only in adults, as no studies with children under the age of 10 years were included.…”

The Immersive Mental Rotations Test: Evaluating Spatial Ability in Virtual Reality

“…Studies employing the MRT have consistently produced results replicating the significant sex effect noted by Vandenberg and Kuse (1978). The performance difference between males and females has been central to much MRT research (e.g., Collins and Kimura, 1997;Moè, 2012;Debelak et al, 2014) and it was found that the average effect size was 0.94 (using Cohen's d = (M 1 -M 2 )/σ)-or that on average males outperform females by almost one standard deviation (Voyer et al, 1995). Contrary to these findings are those of McWilliams et al (1997), Parsons et al (2004), and Monahan et al (2008) who reported no significant gender effect when MRTs were conducted using real 3D models, an ImmersaDesk, or a touchscreen device respectively.…”

“…Examples include: the relationship between spatial abilities (including MRT performance), mental model formation, and a sense of presence in an immersive VE (IVE) (Coxon et al, 2016), the importance of spatial ability (measured through MRT performance) for spatial knowledge acquisition through AR interface use (Hedley, 2003), the role that mental rotation skills play in real-world wayfinding (Malinowski, 2001) and map-based route learning (Çöltekin et al, 2018), the importance of spatial ability (mental rotation) and visuospatial memory in virtual navigation (Lokka and Arzu, 2019), and the impact that spatial abilities (including MRT performance) have on map learning (Sanchez and Branaghan, 2009). Outside the realm of geovisualization, the MRT has been applied in a similar fashion to: evaluate the role of spatial thinking in STEM fields (Hegarty et al, 2014), to study the importance of spatial ability in learning from 3D cell biology models (Huk, 2006), and to explore the relationship between biological sex and mental rotation ability (Casey and Brabeck, 1989;Collins and Kimura, 1997;Hoyek et al, 2012;Moè, 2012;Debelak et al, 2014).…”

Gender differences in mental rotation strategy depend on degree of autistic traits

“…Another systematic study finds that that men were faster than women at mentally rotating polygons, but not alphanumeric characters, PMA symbols, animal drawings or cube figures [Jansen‐Osmann & Heil, ]. Thus, these results support the conclusion that men and women do not differ in processing speed [Debelak et al, ] even though a recent meta‐analysis [Voyer, ] found the size of the male advantage decreases with longer or no time limits.…”