The influence of gender, handedness, and performance level on specialized cognitive functioning

Individual differences in performance on neuropsychological tests were analyzed across age (prepubertal to adult), gender, and handedness groups and examined for performance level as a moderating variable. No differences were observed for the factor structure of these tests across ages and between genders, suggesting similar cognitive structures among these groups. Significant differences in performance were observed between males and females and, to a lesser extent, between right and left handers. Of interest, were significant Gender x Handedness and Gender x Handedness x Level (of performance) interactions seen especially in the older (postpubertal and adult) subjects. High performing, right handed males and left handed females performed better on visuospatial tasks while left handed males and right handed females performed better on verbosequential tasks.     

Sex differences and the factor of time in solving Vandenberg and Kuse mental rotation problems

In accounting for the well-established sex differences on mental rotation tasks that involve cube stimuli of the Shepard and Metzler (Shepard & Metzler, 1971) kind, performance factors are frequently invoked. Three studies are presented that examine performance factors. In Study 1, analyses of the performance of a large number of subjects (n=1765) that performed the Vandenberg and Kuse (1976) mental rotation test (MRT) under standard conditions showed that the magnitude of the sex differences increases as subjects proceed through the sequence of problems, and that fewer females than males reach the last problems in a problem set. This supports the role of time constraints in sex differences on the MRT. Study 2 compared the magnitude of sex differences for subjects (n=212) who did the MRT under standard conditions (T1), and with double the time (T2) allowed for the test. No significant reduction in the magnitude of sex differences was observed-even though the overall scores under T2 increased markedly for both sexes. Study 3 examined the suggestion by that mental rotation differences arise because females spend more time than males in assuring that stimuli that do not match do indeed not match, with no sex differences for matching stimuli. This hypothesis was not supported for a sample of 20 males and 26 females. We conclude that performance factors may play a role in sex difference on mental rotation tasks, but do not account for all of the differences.     

The Relationships of Spatial Ability and Sex to Formal Reasoning Capabilities

The relationships of spatial ability and sex to performance on formal easoning tasks were examined for a group of 34 male and female college tudents. It was hypothesized that spatial ability is positively related to ormal reasoning task performance which is also related to male superiority on formal reasoning task performance. Results indicated that spatial ability vas unrelated to formal reasoning task performance and that sex differinces occurred with the balance task and the pendulum task which sugested that males were superior to females at manifesting the scheme of jroportionality and at being able to isolate variables.     

Familial sinistrality, sex, and laterality differences in naming and Lexical Decision Latencies of right-handers

Sixty-four subjects, divided into four groups of 16 according to sex and familial sinistrality (FS), were given a lateralized Object-Naming Latency Task (ONLT) and a Lexical Decision Latency Task (LDLT). Both tasks showed RVF superiorities. On the ONLT a sex × FS × visual field interaction was obtained, with FS− females and FS+ males showing comparably smaller RVF superiorities than FS+ females and FS− males. On the LDLT an FS by Stimulus Type (word-nonword) interaction was found, FS− subjects being more RVF superior for nonword trials and FS+ subjects more RVF superior for word trials. If one compared only FS− males and females, as some studies have done, greater RVF superiorities obtained for males than females on both the ONLT and word trials of the LDLT. However, FS+ subjects showed the opposite pattern. The data support neither the simple model of FS nor sex influence on language laterality. Data aslso suggest that a history of maternal versus paternal left-handedness may affect lateralization differently in the sexes.     

Sex differences in spatial ability reflected in performance on IQ subtests by black or white examinees

Sex differences in spatial ability were investigated using scores on the performance subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. The sample consisted of 832 adolescents, evenly divided by race (black or white) and sex. Within both racial groups, males outscored females on all of the spatially-oriented subtests, but females outscored males on a subtest emphasizing rote memory. The similarity of patterning of sex differences within each racial group might be interpreted as indicating that something more than social experience alone is involved in this phenomenon.     

Gender and distributive justice: The influence of gender-related characteristics on allocations

The influence of dispositional and situational gender-related factors on the distributive justice behavior of males and females was examined in this research. Using the self-other allocation paradigm, traditional and andrognyous subjects outperformed traditional or androgynous opposite-sex co-workers (Experiment 1) or same-sex co-workers (Experiment 2). The task gender-linkage and the physical attractiveness of the opposite-sex co-workers were also considered. The results indicated that androgynous persons were more generous in their allocations and were less influenced by the gender-related characteristics of an opposite-sex co-workers than traditional persons. In same-sex dyads, males were more equitable than females and were uninfluenced by gender-related factors. Traditional, but not androgynous, females adjusted their allocation behavior according to the gender-linkage of the task, allocating more equitably on gender-congruent tasks than on gender-incongruent tasks. The significance of these findings to understanding sex differences in distributive justice behavior is discussed.     

Handedness and sex differences in hemispheric asymmetry

A study was designed to assess the contributions of the factors of sex and familial history to cerebral dominance, where cerebral dominance was inferred from laterality on a dichotic listening task. The 144 subjects were selected from a larger sample on the basis of handedness, sex, and familial history of sinistrality, and tested on a task involving the dichotic presentation of CV syllables. Analysis of the data indicated that in female subjects, the presence of familial sinistrality increased the likelihood that they present atypical left-ear superiorities, while in males the converse was the case. Moreover, there was a significant sex difference overall, such that males were more clearly lateralized than females. A review of other dichotic listening studies provided support for the reliability of this sex difference for dichotic tasks using verbal material. A review of the clinical literature indicated that the hypothesis of a sex difference is at least tenable and merits further investigation. However, the possibility that there is a sex difference in the cognitive strategy used in dichotic listening cannot be ruled out.     

Sex differences in attributions for sex-typed tasks1

Recent studies have indicated that males make more egotistical attributions than females, that is, males make more internal attributions for success and more external attributions for failure than females do. These sex differences in attributions were examined in terms of male/female differences in expectancies for success and ego-involvement in the tasks. Male and female subjects succeeded or failed on a masculine or a feminine task. It was found that males made more egotistical attributions than females on the masculine task, but females made more egotistical attributions than males on the feminine task. A covariance analysis revealed that these sex differences in attributions could be explained in terms of the differences between the males and females in expectancy for success and in ego-involvement. Finally, it was found that ego-involvement was a more important determinant of egotisical attributions in the present study than was expectancy.     

Some psychological determinants of electrodermal responses to deception

This study explores some of the psychological determinants of electrodermal responses to deception. There were four groups of 24 subjects, consisting of normal males and females, and personality-disordered males and females. The deceptive paradigms used consisted of three guilty knowledge card tasks that differed in the nature of the stimuli used and in procedural instructions. There was also a general question task involving five neutral questions and two emotive moral questions. After each task self-report analogue scales were administered in order to record the subjects' reactions to each task and the type of countermeasure they had used. The subjects also completed the Eysenck Personality Inventory, the Gough Socialization Scale and the Arrow-Dot test. Detectability on card tasks was found to relate to the following: procedural instructions, countermeasure strategies, involvement in the task, the extent to which the critical items are processed into memory, and lack of confidence in one's ability to beat the machine. Personality factors of Introversion, Neuroticism and Ego control had some significant correlations with differential responsivity but this was not consistent across subject samples or tasks. Differential responsivity to questions raising moral issues did not relate significantly to whether or not the subject admitted or denied such behaviour.     

Differential construct validity of intelligence as popularly measured: Correlations of age with raw scores on the WISC-R for Blacks Whites, males, and females

Raw scores on the 12 WISC-R subtests and the verbal, performance, and full scale IQ scales were correlated with age in years separately for 938 White males, 137 Black males, 927 White females, and 153 Black females. Highest and lowest correlations from the four groups were then contrasted for each of the 15 WISC-R variables to determine whether the magnitude of the relationship between age and performance on current tests of intelligence is constant across race and sex. Regression coefficients between age and raw scores were also contrasted across groups. None of the 15 comparisons of corrections yielded differences that were statistically significant. Regression coefficients differed only with respect to the Full Scale IQ, showing smaller incremental changes with age for Black males than for other groups. The results indicated that the relationship between age and intelligence test performance is relatively constant across race and sex and supports the construct validity of the WISC-R as a measure of children's intelligence for Blacks, Whites, males, and females, though some evidence was found to indicate slower development of “g” in Black males as compared to the other groups.     

Sex-role attitudes across two cultures: United States and India

This study tests whether students from India hold more traditional sex role attitudes compared to students from the US, whether women from either country hold more liberal sex role attitudes than males, and whether socioeconomic and demographic factors are better predictors of sex role attitudes among women of either culture. Data were obtained in 1978 from a sample of 409 undergraduate students from three Mississippi colleges in the US and 419 undergraduate and graduate students from three educational institutions in Andhra Pradesh, India. Sex role attitudes are measured by scaling developed by Scanzoni (1975). Out of a total possible score of 100, the mean values are 69.09 for the US sample and 53.62 for the Indian sample. Differences between the means for all 20 sex role attitudes are statistically significant. Results indicate that US females and Indian females had less traditional sex role attitudes than their respective counterparts. Mother role, wife role, father role, and total sex role attitude were more traditional among males in India compared to males in the US and among females in India compared to females in the US. More traditional attitudes were held by males in India with lower educated fathers and unemployed mothers. Religion was the only variable significantly related to Indian female students. In the US, traditional sex role attitudes of males were significantly related to high maternal income and residence in urban areas. More traditional sex role attitudes among US females were related to increasing age and marital status. Stepwise analysis reveals that the most powerful explanatory factors were sex and mother's occupation among Indian students and sex, father's income, and year in college among US students. What little variance was explained was explained by more variables in the US sample, and the best model predictors explained more variance in the US sample.     

Hemispheric alpha asymmetries and behavioral responses of aphasic and normal subjects for the recall and recognition of active, passive, and negative sentences

The hemispheric alpha asymmetries of a group of normal males, a group of normal females, and a group of aphasic patients (fluent and dysfluent) were examined with electroencephalographic (EEG) techniques under memory conditions of recall and recognition of active, passive, and negative sentences. Aphasic patients, regardless of classification, showed right hemispheric alpha suppression across memory conditions and sentence types. Both normal groups were found to have greater left hemispheric alpha suppression for the recall memory condition and greater right hemispheric alpha suppression for the recognition memory condition (males significantly more than females). The aphasic subjects performed better on recognition tasks compared to recalled tasks and active sentences compared to transformed sentences. Results are discussed as providing evidence of the aphasic subjects' greater dependency on information processing resources of the right hemisphere in the recovery of language function. The findings are also discussed as providing support for a multiple-resources model of information processing.     

The person's conception of the structures of developing intellect: early adolescence to middle age

According to experiential structuralism, thought abilities have six capacity spheres: experimental, propositional, quantitative, imaginal, qualitative, and metacognitive. The first five are applied to the environment. The metacognitive capacity is applied to the others, serving as the interface between reality and the cognitive system or between any of the other capacities. To test this postulate, 648 subjects aged 12 to 40 years, solved eight tasks that were addressed, in pairs, to the first four capacity spheres. One of the tasks in each pair tapped the first and the other the third formal level of the sphere. Having solved the tasks, the subjects were required to rate each pair of tasks in terms of similarity of operations, difficulty, and success of solution. Factor analysis of difficulty and success evaluation scores revealed the same capacity-specific factors as the analysis of performance scores. Factor analysis of similarity scores differentiated between same- and different-sphere pairs. Analysis of variance showed that difficulty and success evaluation scores preserved performance differences between the first and the third formal tasks. Cognitive level, age, socioeconomic status, and sex were related to the metacognitive measures in ways similar to their relations to performance measures. These findings were integrated into a model aimed at capturing real-time metacognitive functioning.     

Expectancy of success on sex-linked tasks

College subjects undertook nine cognitive tasks with different perceived sex linkages, stating their expectancy of success prior to each task and attributing causality for their perceived performance following each task. As hypothesized, two components were present in the overall sex difference in expectancy of success, even when differences in actual task performance were statistically controlled. One component was attributable to a general tendency of females to state lower expectancies; the other was a function of the accord between the perceived sex linkage of the task and the subject's sex. The attribution data suggest that females tend to be more external for success and more internal for failure than males.The research reported here was partially supported by Grant #10692 from the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. The assistance of Bruce Eisman in testing subjects and of Rudy Lorber in data analysis is gratefully acknowledged.     

Sex Differences in Object Location Memory

The ability to remember where objects were is thought to require multiple separate processes. One has to encode the precise positions occupied, assign the various objects to the correct (relative) locations, and achieve an integration of both types of spatial information. This study examined whether sex differences exist for these selective components of object location memory. Twenty males and 20 females participated in the following task. On a PC screen, they were shown a square with 10 different objects for 30 s. Subsequently, the objects disappeared from the screen, reappeared in a row above the square, and subjects were asked to relocate them in three different conditions. In the object-to-position-assignment condition, the original positions were premarked in the square, so subjects needed only to assign the correct object to the correct position. In the positions-only condition, all objects assumed the same identity. Therefore, subjects had only to reproduce the precise positions. Finally, in the combined condition, subjects were required to replace all the different objects in the square without any of object positions premarked. The absolute displacements between an object's original and its relocated position reflect the integration mechanism. Females did as well as males in the object-to-position-assignment condition and on the absolute displacements in the combined condition, but they were less efficient than males in positional reconstruction per se. Thus, it seems that the male advantage in spatial memory is not a general effect but applies only to certain specific processing components. Moreover, the employment of a dual task during encoding, concurrent articulatory suppression, yielded no significant interactions with sex. This suggests that females' weaker positional encoding does not derive from the use of an inefficient verbal strategy.     

Gender Differences in Illusion Response: The Influence of Spatial Strategy and Sex Ratio

Two experiments explored factors related to gender differences in Ponzo illusion susceptibility. In Experiment 1, 54 male and 54 female (predominantly white, middle class) undergraduates were administered Witkin's Embedded Figures Test (EFT) and, on 2 separate occasions, a form of the Ponzo illusion. Results showed the Ponzo to be quite reliable over several days. Females were significantly more field dependent (as shown by slower responses to the EFT), and significantly more susceptible to the Ponzo illusion, than males. Furthermore, EFT performance correlated significantly with Ponzo susceptibility for females, but not for males, suggesting that the difference between males and females in Ponzo response may be due not to differences in field independence per se, but rather to differences in the strategies used to solve the illusion task. In Experiment 2, 111 male and 148 female (predominantly white, middle class) undergraduates were administered the Ponzo illusion twice, the 2 administrations separated by about 90 min. Again, the illusion task showed good reliability, and females were significantly more susceptible to the illusion. Furthermore, the magnitude of the difference between males and females was systematically related to the sex ratio (the ratio of the number of males to the number of females) of the particular session in which each subject happened to be participating. It is suggested that social factors such as sex ratio might affect the strategies participants use when doing illusion tasks, and perhaps other spatial skills tasks as well.     

Formal thinking about correlation

Twenty-five adults were administered two tasks involving the data of 12,2X2 matrices. In the first, subjects were invited to make decisions on the basis of data which was presented as involving causal, one-way relationships. Four groups of subjects were distinguished in the level of their operational thinking. In task 2 the subjects were invited to make judgements on identical data, but presented as involving two-way noncausal relationships. Results showed changes in the level of thought: subjects employing concrete operations in task 1 regressed to lower levels of thought; subjects employing transitional formal thought in task 1 advanced to fully formal thought in task 2. It was concluded that the first task imposed a ceiling effect on the thought levels of the latter subjects. Results showed that the level of thought employed was a function of the frequency of the data in the cells of the matrices and that the emergence of illogical thought was related to task difficulty.     

Sex differences in chronic stress effects on memory in rats

Recent studies in rodent models and in humans have shown that the status of both the gonadal and adrenal axes (hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal, HPG and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, HPA, respectively) can influence learning and memory function. In this article, the effects of activating the HPA axis (stress) on performance of memory tasks in rats are reviewed. More importantly, results are presented which show that chronic stress has a different impact on performance of these tasks depending upon the sex of the rat. These observations are novel and potentially important since few studies, animal or human, have utilized females as subjects in studies of the stress response. Sex differences in the effects of chronic stress on memory were investigated in rats using an object recognition task and two spatial memory tasks, radial arm maze and object location. Given the same chronic stress--21 days of restraint for 6 h each day--males were impaired in all of the memory tests while females showed enhanced performance of the spatial memory tasks and no changes in object recognition performance. Levels of neurotransmitters and metabolites were measured in brain areas important for cognition in the subjects in order to determine neural systems that may respond to stress and mediate the cognitive responses. These results show that responses of monoamine and amino acid containing neural systems may contribute to or underlie sex differences in stress effects on cognition. Stress decreased dopaminergic activity in the frontal cortex and amygdala of males but not females; whereas, in CA3 of the hippocampus, stress increased levels of 5-HT and norepinephrine in females, but not males, and increased GABA in males, but not females. Finally, a possible role for estradiol in mediating sexually differentiated responses to stress was examined. Behavioral and neurochemical evaluations in ovariectomized, stressed females, with or without estrogen replacement, suggest that sex differences in response to stress are influenced by both the organizing and activating effects of estradiol. A few, recent studies in humans, that show sexually dimorphic relationships between chronic stress and cognition, are also highlighted. These results in humans are consistent with the pattern of results in rats. Clearly, further studies are necessary to substantiate sex differences in stress effects on memory function in humans and to understand mechanisms whereby estrogen may influence the stress response in rats. Nonetheless, recent studies show sexually differentiated cognitive responses to chronic stress and underline the importance of considering the sex/gender of subjects when studying the stress response.     

Individual and sex differences in reminiscence

Inverted alphabet printing, rotary pursuit, and mirror tracking tasks were administered to 84 subjects in order to ascertain (a) reproducibility of reminiscence scores within and between tasks and (b)sex differences in reminiscence. With prerest performance levels held constant by second-order partial correlation procedures, reproducibility of individual reminiscence differences within tasks was significant but quite low, while predictability of reminiscence from one task to another was negligible. The sexes reminisced essentially alike on inverted alphabet printing, but females reminisced more than males on the other tasks, presumably because they were relatively more depressed by massed practice on these tasks. Thus, individual and sex differences were essentially task specific. Implications of results for reminiscence theories and for the credibility of alleged relationships between reminiscence and other organismic variables were discussed.     

Sex differences in feelings attributed to a woman in situations involving coercion and sexual advances.

This study investigated sex differences of feelings attributed to a woman in situations involving varying degrees of coercion and sexual advances. Sixteen vignettes (12 dealing with sex and coercion, 4 dealing with coercion only) were rated on 17 semantic differential scales by 59 undergraduates (44 females, 15 males) and 45 graduate students (18 females, 27 males). The 16 vignettes yielded factors of Sexual Flattery/Overtures, Sexual Aggressiveness, and Violence. Factor analyses of the 17 semantic differential scales yielded factors of Helplessness, Aversiveness, and Threat. High agreement was found between males and females in both the graduate and undergraduate samples on the relative intensity of feelings attributed to the woman across the sex/coercion vignettes for the three dimensions of Helplessness, Aversiveness, and Threat. Even more importantly, systematic differences between males and females on intensity of attributed feelings across the semantic differential factors were independently replicated using the graduate and undergraduate samples. Analyses of variance revealed that males showed significantly greater attributions on the factors Helplessness and Threat on scenes mainly dealing with sexual flattery/overtures, whereas they showed significantly less attributions on the factor Aversiveness on scenes dealing with sexual aggressiveness and rape. In short, while there was strong agreement between men and women, there were also replicated significant systematic differences with men overestimating the psychological impact of less intense incidents and underestimating the psychological impact on women of more intense incidents.