Spatial anxiety mediates the sex difference in adult mental rotation test performance

Abstract

Mental rotation ability is associated with successful advances in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and occupations. Meta-analyses have shown consistent sex disparities in mental rotation, where men outperform women on one measure of mental rotation ability, the Mental Rotations Test (MRT). Spatial anxiety, or the fear and apprehension felt when completing a task that requires spatial thinking, was proposed as a mechanism explaining the relation between sex and mental rotation test performance. This study modified the Spatial Anxiety Scale (SAS) to include questions about how anxious individuals feel when they must mentally rotate items to accomplish a task (e.g., playing Tetris). An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to assess the factorial structure of the modified spatial anxiety scale. Three factor loadings were extracted representing the ability to navigate, mentally rotate objects, and visualize objects. Furthermore, we analyzed the role of spatial anxiety and trait anxiety as potential mediators of the relation between participant sex and mental rotation performance. Spatial anxiety partially mediated the link between the sex of the participants and the MRT performance controlling for trait anxiety. Only navigation and mental rotation anxiety significantly mediated the relation between participant sex and mental rotation performance. We posit spatial anxiety as a barrier to efficient and accurate spatial thinking, and suggest that reducing spatial anxiety has the potential to improve spatial skills and reduce sex differences in mental rotation test performance. To ascertain this, an experimental design can determine whether a reduction in spatial anxiety causes changes in mental rotation test scores.

Affective Factors Affect Visuospatial Decision-making: A Drift Diffusion Modeling Approach

“…This particular type of visuospatial decision making is associated with robust gender differences favoring males (Uttal et al, 2013;Voyer et al, 1995), but it is less clear why they exist and whether affective factors play a role in their instantiation. Research examining the potential role of affective factors in accounting for the gender-performance link provides evidence for mediating roles of spatial anxiety (Alvarez-Vargas et al, 2020;Sokolowski et al, 2019) and confidence (Estes & Felker, 2012) such that when anxiety or confidence is accounted for, gender differences in accuracy diminish. However, an open question remains: what role do affective factors play in influencing mental rotation performance in males and females?…”

Advancing multimedia learning for science: Comparing the effect of virtual versus physical models on student learning about stereochemistry

“…As the correlational analysis indicates that spatial skills were associated with participants' gender, and prior research indicates that gender differences are apparent on many tests of spatial skills (Alvarez-Vargas et al, 2020;Hegarty, 2018;Miller & Halpern, 2013) as well as student outcome measures in the physical sciences (Taasoobshirazi & Carr, 2008;Turner & Lindsay, 2003), we examined for gender differences on various measures administered in our study. T tests were conducted to examine for differences in performance between males and females on the measures conducted in this study.…”

“…Finally, whether students' spatial skills influence their learning from physical models or virtual models and whether they affect the transfer and application of the learned information to new but relevant content will be investigated. As gender differences are apparent on many tests of spatial skills (Alvarez-Vargas et al, 2020;Hegarty, 2018;Miller & Halpern, 2013), and also have been found on outcome measures in the physical sciences (Taasoobshirazi & Carr, 2008;Turner & Lindsay, 2003), gender will be included as a covariate in the analyses to obtain a more accurate assessment of the influence of the type of ELT and the role of spatial skills on student learning.…”

Visual imagination and cognitive mapping of a virtual building

“…Interestingly, we did not see the typical sex difference in either mental rotation or cognitive mapping that has been widely reported previously ( Galea and Kimura, 1993 ; Moffat et al, 1998 ). This observation is frequent but still unexplained – it does not universally occur, and may have explanations beyond mental rotation capability per se, such as spatial anxiety ( Alvarez-Vargas et al, 2020 ), differences in strategy use ( Hegarty, 2018 ), nature of stimulus presentation ( Fisher et al, 2018 ) and practice effects ( Meneghetti et al, 2017 ) as well as spatial experience generally. Our sample was small, however, and males comprised less than half (29/80).…”