Gender-specific movement strategies using a computer-pointing task

Females typically demonstrate a movement time advantage for tasks requiring high levels of manual dexterity, whereas males are notably better at targeting activities. According to D. Kimura (2000), the hunter-gatherer hypothesis primarily accounts for those performance advantages; that dichotomy fails, however, when one makes movement outcome predictions for tasks that are not clearly fine-motor or interceptive in nature. Investigators have recently proposed that time constraints (M. Peters, 2005) and gender-specific response style differences (M. Peters & P. Campagnaro, 1996; L. E. Rohr, 2006) affect motor performance. Here, the author used a computer-pointing task measuring both movement error and movement time in 16 participants to further investigate response style differences. Kinematic and linear regression analyses between resultant error and both movement time and task difficulty reinforced the notion that gender-specific movement biases emphasize speed and accuracy, respectively, for men and women.     

Gender-Specific Movement Strategies Using a Computer-Pointing Task

Females typically demonstrate a movement time advantage for tasks requiring high levels of manual dexterity, whereas males are notably better at targeting activities. According to D. Kimura (2000), the hunter-gatherer hypothesis primarily accounts for those performance advantages; that dichotomy fails, however, when one makes movement outcome predictions for tasks that are not clearly fine-motor or interceptive in nature. Investigators have recently proposed that time constraints (M. Peters, 2005) and gender-specific response style differences (M. Peters & P. Campagnaro, 1996; L. E. Rohr, 2006) affect motor performance. Here, the author used a computer-pointing task measuring both movement error and movement time in 16 participants to further investigate response style differences. Kinematic and linear regression analyses between resultant error and both movement time and task difficulty reinforced the notion that gender-specific movement biases emphasize speed and accuracy, respectively, for men and women.     

Men are more accurate than women in aiming at targets in both near space and extrapersonal space

Men excel at motor tasks requiring aiming accuracy whereas women excel at different tasks requiring fine motor skill. However, these tasks are confounded with proximity to the body, as fine motor tasks are performed proximally and aiming tasks are directed at distal targets. As such, it is not known whether the male advantage on tasks requiring aiming accuracy is because men have better aim or is better in the proximal domain in which the task is usually presented. 18 men (M age = 20.6 yr., SD = 3.0) and 20 women (M age = 18.7 yr., SD = 0.9) performed 2 tasks of extrapersonal aiming accuracy (>2 m away), 2 tasks of aiming accuracy performed in near space (< 1 m from them), and a task of fine motor skill. Men outperformed women on both the extrapersonal aiming tasks, and women outperformed men on the task of fine motor skill. However, a male advantage was observed for one of the aiming tasks performed in near space, suggesting that the male advantage for aiming accuracy does not result from proximity.     

Gender-Based Navigation Stereotype Improves Men’s Search for a Hidden Goal

While a general stereotype exists that men are better at navigating than women, experimental evidence indicates that men and women differ in their use of spatial strategies, and this preference determines gender-differences. When both environmental geometry and landmark cues are available, men appear to learn to navigate using both types of cues, while women show a preference for using landmarks. Using a computer-generated task, 80 undergraduate students from North-East England learned to navigate to a hidden goal. Activating the general navigation stereotype improved the performance of men, compared to the control condition, both when only geometric cues and only landmark cues were present (stereotype lift), suggesting that activating a general stereotype can affect tasks both with (geometry) and without (landmark) established gender-differences in preference. In addition, in the test trial (hidden goal removed) women who learned to navigate using only landmarks spent longer in the correct location of the hidden goal than those who learned to navigate using only geometry. In contrast, the opposite result was found for men, suggesting that when only one cue-type is available, gender-differences still occur, with women better able to navigate using landmarks than geometry, while men seemed to learn more about the location of the goal with reference to geometric than landmark cues.     

Gender Role Orientation and Performance on Stereotypically Feminine and Masculine Cognitive Tasks

Nash (1979) argued that people tend to perform better on cognitive tasks when their gender-related self-concept is consistent with the stereotyping of the tasks. In order to evaluate Nash's hypothesis, participants were administered the S&M Mental Rotation Task, the Controlled Word Association Test, and the Bem (1974) Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). In men gender role orientation was significantly related to performance on the verbal task, with the critical factor being androgyny. When femininity and masculinity were assessed individually, femininity was found to be significantly related to the verbal task in men only. In women there was no significant variability across the gender role types in relation to performance on either task. These findings suggest that the importance of gender is dependent on the task and participants' sex. Nash's hypothesis was not supported for the mental rotation task.     

The importance of gesture in children's spatial reasoning

On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, whether they were given explicit instruction or just practice. Regardless of training condition, the more children gestured about moving the pieces when asked to explain how they solved the spatial transformation task, the better they performed on the task, with boys gesturing about movement significantly more (and performing better) than girls. Gesture thus provides useful information about children's spatial strategies, raising the possibility that gesture training may be particularly effective in improving children's mental rotation skills.     

An fMRI study of sex differences in regional activation to a verbal and a spatial task

Sex differences in cognitive performance have been documented, women performing better on some phonological tasks and men on spatial tasks. An earlier fMRI study suggested sex differences in distributed brain activation during phonological processing, with bilateral activation seen in women while men showed primarily left-lateralized activation. This blood oxygen level-dependent fMRI study examined sex differences (14 men, 13 women) in activation for a spatial task (judgment of line orientation) compared to a verbal-reasoning task (analogies) that does not typically show sex differences. Task difficulty was manipulated. Hypothesized ROI-based analysis documented the expected left-lateralized changes for the verbal task in the inferior parietal and planum temporal regions in both men and women, but only men showed right-lateralized increase for the spatial task in these regions. Image-based analysis revealed a distributed network of cortical regions activated by the tasks, which consisted of the lateral frontal, medial frontal, mid-temporal, occipitoparietal, and occipital regions. The activation was more left lateralized for the verbal and more right for the spatial tasks, but men also showed some left activation for the spatial task, which was not seen in women. Increased task difficulty produced more distributed activation for the verbal and more circumscribed activation for the spatial task. The results suggest that failure to activate the appropriate hemisphere in regions directly involved in task performance may explain certain sex differences in performance. They also extend, for a spatial task, the principle that bilateral activation in a distributed cognitive system underlies sex differences in performance.     

Sex differences in performance on three novel continuous response tasks

The Dynavision apparatus was used to assess psychomotor differences between men and women first-time users. Subjects, 50 men and 76 women, were tested on three 60-sec. Dynavision response tasks of graded difficulty. An analysis of variance with repeated measures indicated that men performed significantly better than women on all tasks. Performances on all tasks were also significantly different from each other within both sexes (p < or = .05). Furthermore, a significant interaction between sex and task was based on a greater drop in performance on the most complex task for women than for men.     

Sex differences in verbal fluency: the role of strategies and instructions

Sex differences in verbal fluency performance and strategies are highly controversial, nevertheless suggesting a slight female advantage at least for phonemic fluency. A tendency of increased clustering of words into phonemic and semantic subcategories in men and increased switching between those categories in women has been suggested. In spatial tasks, it has been demonstrated that changes in instructions favoring a certain cognitive strategy can alter sex differences in performance. Such an approach has, however, not been attempted previously with verbal tasks. In the present investigation, 19 women in their luteal cycle phase and 23 men performed a phonemic and a semantic fluency task with three different instructions, one neutral, one emphasizing the clustering, and one emphasizing the switching of words. While under neutral instructions no sex differences were observed in verbal fluency performance and strategies, sex differences in switching and overall performance were observed in semantic fluency with an instruction requiring a switching strategy. Furthermore, correlation analyses suggested that the importance of strategies for overall performance differed between women and men. While only switching, but not clustering was related to overall verbal fluency performance in all tasks under all instructions, this relationship was driven by women in the phonemic task, but by men in the semantic task. These results highlight the importance of a consistent methodology in sex difference research. Slight variations in instructions may in part explain inconsistencies regarding sex differences in verbal fluency between previous studies.     

Effect of prior mental activity on a parafoveal task

This study investigated the effects of spatial and verbal tasks on subsequent strategies of men and women on a parafoveal task. Dextrals, 30 men and 30 women, performed a parafoveal task which had been previously demonstrated to show no visual-field advantage. Mental activity resulting from the spatial and verbal prior tasks produced a right-field (left-brain) advantage on the parafoveal task, which was significantly greater for men than for women.     

Preferences for skill versus chance-determined activities: The influence of gender and task sex-typing

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that skill-chance activity preference by men and women is moderated by task sex relatedness. Men and women (total N = 368) opted to perform either skill or chance versions of masculine and feminine tasks, and then provided ratings of performance expectancy, importance of success, and perceptions of task characteristics. Results support the conclusion that men do not prefer skill and women chance as had been found previously, but rather that while men's skill preferences are higher than women's on a masculine taks, women prefer skill more than do men on a feminine task. Skill-chance preferences were primarily a function of the expectancy of success on skill tasks.     

Sex-role orientation,behavioral adaptability and personal adjustment

Bem's Sex-Role Inventory was used to classify 111 college men and women into masculine, feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated sex-role categories. Subjects were tested for emotional expressivity (feminine task), assertiveness (masculine task), and personal integration. Sex typed and cross-sex typed subjects performed well only on those tasks which were congruent with their measured sex role. Androgynous subjects exhibited the greatest behavioral adaptability, performing well on both masculine and feminine tasks; undifferentiated subjects performed poorly on both tasks, but particularly so on sex-reversed tasks. Thus, behavioral flexibility was shown to derive from strong identifications with both masculine and feminine roles (androgyny) rather than from a simple lack of identification with either role. In addition, contrary to previous findings that masculine-typed women are better adjusted than feminine-typed women, androgynous and sex typed subjects both scored high in personal integration, with cross-sex typed subjects of both sexes scoring as low as undifferentiated subjects.     

Effects of age and sex on reciprocal tapping performance

Using a reciprocal tapping task (Fitts's task), the speed and accuracy of small-amplitude motor movements of the hand were measured for 62 men and 84 women, 20 to 89 yr. of age. Men and women in their 20s and 30s performed similarly, although men in their 20s displayed a tendency to trade accuracy in favor of speed. Movement time increased noticeably for both men and women beginning with the 40s decade and continued to increase through the 80s decade. Error rates were lower for women than men and were relatively uniform for both men and women across all age decades past 30 yr. Older subjects of both sexes appeared to sacrifice speed (slowed down) to maintain accuracy on the task. The slope of the linear regression relating movement time to task difficulty was steeper for men than for women and increased more for men than women with advancing age, indicating that older men slowed down relatively more than older women on more difficult tasks.     

Cooperation Induces an Increase in Emotional Response,as Measured by Electrodermal Activity and Mood

Humans need social interaction with others for survival. Competition and cooperation are two somewhat opposed interpersonal strategies that help us to achieve both individual and shared aims and objectives. The aim of this research was to study whether autonomic activity is a good indicator of emotional activation in response to social interaction (cooperation, competition) or working alone, considering gender and outcome obtained in tasks (positive or negative) as moderating variables. We tested electrodermal activity (EDA) and mood before, during and after social (cooperation, competition) or working alone in men (64) and women (60), young-adult students from the University of Valencia. Higher EDA was observed in individuals taking part the cooperative than the competitive task. Further, men who competed showed lower SCLs than men who performed the other type of task. In contrast, women who cooperated demonstrated lower NSCRs than women who competed and men who cooperated. Participants with negative outcomes and women were found to have worse mood states. Our results may be generalizable to situations in which negotiation, mediation and cooperative strategies are relevant for decision making and/or problem solving.     

Solution strategies as possible explanations of individual and sex differences in a dynamic spatial task

When individuals perform spatial tasks, individual differences emerge in accuracy and speed as well as in the response patterns used to cope with the task. The purpose of this study is to identify, through empirical criteria, the different response patterns or strategies used by individuals when performing the dynamic spatial task presented in the Spatial Orientation Dynamic Test-Revised (SODT-R). Results show that participants can be classified according to their response patterns. Three different ways of solving a task are described, and their relation to (a) performance factors (response latency, response frequency, and invested time) and (b) ability tests (analytical reasoning, verbal reasoning, and spatial estimation) are investigated. Sex differences in response patterns and performance are also analyzed. It is found that the frequency with which men and women employ each one of the strategies described here, is different and statistically significant. Thus, employed strategy plays an important role when interpreting sex differences on dynamic spatial tasks.     

Why does working memory span predict complex cognition? Testing the strategy affordance hypothesis

We introduce and empirically evaluate the strategy affordance hypothesis, which holds that individual differences in strategy use will mediate the relationship between performances on a working memory (WM) span task and another cognitive task only when the same strategies are afforded by both tasks. One hundred forty-eight participants completed basic memory tasks and verbal span tasks that afford the same strategies, such as imagery and sentence generation, and completed reading comprehension tasks that afford different ones, such as self-questioning and summarization. Effective strategy use on WM span tasks accounted for variance in the span-memory relationship, but not for the span-comprehension relationship, supporting the strategy affordance hypothesis. Strategy use mediated the span-cognition relationship only when both tasks afforded the same strategies.     

Are there gender differences in verbal and visuospatial working-memory resources?

Whereas women generally outperform men in episodic-memory tasks, little is known as to how the genders compare with respect to basic working-memory operations. In reference to Baddeley's (1986) model, the present study searched for possible gender differences in terms of accuracy (but not speed) of working-memory processes. Men and women completed series of working-memory tasks respectively involving verbal and visuospatial information, as well as a double-span task involving both classes of information. Control measures included verbal fluency and mental rotation tasks in which gender differences are frequently obtained. In these tasks, the results showed several of the expected gender contrasts. However, men and women were not found to differ significantly in any type of working memory save in the double-span task where women surpassed men. The patterns of task intercorrelation were largely similar in both genders. Discussion emphasises the manifestation, based on the present exploration, of an almost identical working-memory architecture in men and women.     

Sex differences in spatial ability: a lateralization of function approach

The current study was designed to examine whether the extent of the male advantage in performance on a spatial task was determined by the extent to which the task was right-hemisphere dependent. Participants included 108 right-handed men and women who completed the mental rotation, waterlevel, and paperfolding tasks, all of which were presented bilaterally. The results partially supported the hypothesis. On the mental rotation task, men showed a right-hemisphere advantage, whereas women showed no hemispheric differences; however, no overall sex differences were observed. On the waterlevel task, men outperformed women, and both men and women showed a right-hemisphere advantage. On the paperfolding task, no sex or hemispheric differences were observed. Although the findings of the current study were mixed, the study provides a framework for examining sex differences across different types of spatial ability.     

Generalization of error detection across motor tasks by men and women

One of the cornerstones of the human motor learning process is the ability to self-detect and self-correct movement errors. However, despite their importance, relatively little research has been done on these topics. One unanswered question is whether error detection is a general ability or one specific to the task to be learned. To investigate this issue, 66 college-age participants (49 women and 17 men) performed four motor learning tasks: an anticipation-timing task, a slow arm-positioning task, a rapid arm-movement task (400-msec. goal), and a tone-duration production task (400-msec. goal). 50 practice trials were provided on each task, 35 with knowledge of results (KR) and 15 without KR. Participants verbally estimated error on all trials before KR was given, except for the slow positioning task on which overall error in performance was the measure of error detection. Error detection was developed for each task but transfer of this ability only occurred when two tasks shared the same movement pattern. Men performed better on anticipation-timing than women, but men and women detected errors equally well on all tasks.     

The influence of sex and empathy on putting oneself in the shoes of others

We tested whether putting oneself in the shoes of others is easier for women, possibly as a function of individuals' empathy levels, and whether any sex difference might be modulated by the sex of presented figures. Participants (N=100, 50 women) imagined (a) being in the spatial position of front‐facing and back‐facing female and male figures (third person perspective (3PP) task) and (b) that the figures were their own mirror reflections (first person perspective (1PP) task). After mentally taking the figure's position, individuals decided whether the indicated hand of the figure would be their own left or right hand. Contrary to our hypothesis, results from the 3PP‐task showed higher rotational costs for women than men, suggesting that mental rotation rather than social strategies had been employed. However, faster responding by women with higher empathy scores would appear to indicate that some women engaged social perspective taking strategies irrespective of the figures' position. Figures' sex was relevant to task performance as higher rotational costs were observed for male figures in the 3PP‐task for both sexes and for female figures in the 1PP‐task for women. We argue that these latter findings indicate that performance was facilitated and/or inhibited towards figures associated with specific social and emotional implications.