Erratum: Durable and generalized effects of spatial experience on mental rotation: Gender differences in growth patterns

The above article (DOI: 10.1002/acp.1420 ) was published online on 26 November 2007 and in print in Volume 22: 996‐1013, 2008. A printing error was subsequently identified in the article. Page 996: Missing author information. Should read Dr. Nora S. Newcombe, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA, National Science Foundation Grants REC‐0337360 and SBE0541957.     

Explaining sex differences in mental rotation: role of spatial activity experience

Males consistently outperform females on mental rotation tasks, such as the Vandenberg and Kuse (1978) Perceptual and Motor Skills, 47(2), 599–604, mental rotation test (MRT; e.g. Voyer et al. 1995) in Psychological Bulletin, 117, 250–265. The present study investigates whether these sex differences in MRT scores can be explained in part by early spatial activity experience, particularly those spatial activities that have been sex-typed as masculine/male-oriented. Utilizing an online survey, 571 ethnically diverse adult university students completed a brief demographic survey, an 81-item spatial activity survey, and the MRT. Results suggest that the significant relation between sex of the participant and MRT score is partially mediated by the number of masculine spatial activities participants had engaged in as youth. Closing the gap between males and females in spatial ability, a skill linked to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics success, may be accomplished in part by encouraging female youth to engage in more particular kinds of spatial activities.     

Understanding spatial transformations: similarities and differences between mental rotation and mental folding

Mental rotation and mental folding, two widely used measures of spatial ability, both require the dynamic spatial transformation of objects with respect to their internal spatial structure. Traditionally, however, these two skills have been considered quite distinct, based primarily on factor analyses of psychometric data. This paper reviews the similarities and differences between mental rotation and mental folding from a variety of perspectives, including their definitions, component cognitive processes, neurological bases, developmental trajectories, malleability, predictive validity, and psychometric properties. We conclude that mental rotation and mental folding are similar in many respects. However, the tasks differ in whether they require rigid or non-rigid transformations of objects. In addition, mental rotation shows robust sex-related differences whereas mental folding does not. We also identify specific questions for which research is lacking.     

Time limits and gender differences on paper-and-pencil tests of mental rotation: a meta-analysis

The purpose of this study was to summarize research relevant to the influence of time limits on gender differences in paper-and-pencil tasks of mental rotation by means of a meta-analysis. Thirty-six effect sizes from published and unpublished studies examining the influence of time constraints were retrieved. Results showed that gender differences in mental rotation are significantly larger when the task is administered with time constraints compared to when such constraints are absent. In addition, the magnitude of gender differences was linearly related to the amount of time available for test completion. These findings were not related to the age or the year of birth of participants in the retrieved studies. The results are discussed with regard to their implications for explanations of gender differences in mental rotation and cognitive abilities in general.     

Item type,occlusion, and gender differences in mental rotation

Two experiments were conducted to examine the role of item type in mental rotation. In each experiment, participants completed two computerized mental rotation tasks, one with blocks as stimuli and one with human figures as stimuli. The tasks were formatted either as a multiple-choice psychometric test (Experiment 1) or as a same–different type task (Experiment 2). Aside from the expected replication of a decreased effect of occlusion on women's accuracy when processing human figures compared to block figures, it was hypothesized that response times would increase when processing the complex but familiar human figures, compared to the simple but unfamiliar block figures. In Experiment 1, the results relevant to occlusion were replicated. However, the presence of a speed–accuracy trade-off suggested that participants processed human figures faster but less accurately than block figures. In Experiment 2, both men and women performed faster and more accurately when processing occluded human figures than when processing nonoccluded human figures. The effect of item type, its potential link to embodied cognition, and the role of strategy selection on gender differences in mental rotation are discussed.     

Spatial anxiety and self-confidence mediate sex/gender differences in mental rotation

A recent meta-synthesis study with a sample of >12 million participants revealed that the male advantage in mental rotation (MR) is the largest cognitive sex/gender difference found in psychological literature. MR requires test takers to mentally rotate three-dimensional cubic figures under time restrictions. Previous studies have investigated how biological and social factors contribute to cognitive sex/gender differences in tasks of this type. Spatial anxiety and self-confidence in MR tasks have received less attention. The present study investigated the contribution of these psychological factors to sex/gender differences in MR performance. Participants (n = 269) completed two MR tasks that differed in task difficulty. Participants also indicated their self-confidence (for each item) and spatial anxiety. The results revealed that pronounced sex/gender differences in spatial anxiety and self-confidence mediate sex/gender in MR performance, especially when task demands are high. The current findings suggest that task-irrelevant factors that are not spatial cognitive in nature contribute largely to the well-known medium to large sex/gender differences in MR. Future studies should further explore mechanisms underlying cognitive sex/gender differences within a biopsychosocial approach.

Although men''s and women''s cognitive profiles largely overlap, sex/gender¹ differences in certain cognitive abilities are consistently reported, albeit with different effect sizes (e.g., Hyde 2005; Torres et al. 2006; Toivainen et al. 2018; Hirnstein et al. 2019). While women tend to outperform men in some verbal tasks, such as speech production (d = 0.33) (Hyde 2005), men tend to achieve higher performance in some spatial abilities (Voyer et al. 1995; Reilly and Neumann 2013). Spatial abilities are needed to perceive, localize, visualize, manipulate, and understand relationships between objects in space (Uttal et al. 2013; Newcombe and Shipley 2015).When compared with other tests of spatial perception (d = 0.44) and spatial visualization (d = 0.19), mental rotation (MR; d = 0.56–0.73) produces the most reliable sex/gender difference (Voyer et al. 1995). In fact, a metasynthesis based on >12 million participants revealed that the male advantage in MR is the largest cognitive sex/gender difference found in the psychological literature (Zell et al. 2015). MR refers to a process in which participants visualize and mentally rotate objects (Voyer et al. 1995). MR is an intrinsic dynamic spatial task in line with a classification by Uttal et al. (2013). In particular, the Mental Rotation Test (MRT) is a well-established psychometric paper–pencil test in which participants are required to mentally rotate three-dimensional (3D) cube figures designed by Shepard and Metzler (1971) and asked to identify which two out of four stimulus figures match a target figure under a time limit (Peters 1995).Meta-analyses on sex/gender differences in MR have shown medium to large effect sizes in favor of men (Linn and Petersen 1985; Voyer et al. 1995; Voyer 2011; Reilly and Neumann 2013), which have remained relatively stable across the years (Masters and Sanders 1993). Although the male advantage in MR has been shown to be larger in adults compared with children (Voyer et al. 1995), it did not significantly decrease as the year of birth increased. This suggests that the magnitude of sex/gender differences in MR is less affected by the social environment in which participants were raised (Voyer et al. 1995).Additionally, there are specific task characteristics that affect the size of the sex/gender difference in MR performance (Linn and Petersen 1985; Collins and Kimura 1997; Peters 2005; Voyer 2011). For example, it has been argued that the use of 3D objects might increase sex/gender differences. However, MR tasks involving 2D objects have also shown a male advantage when task difficulty is high (Collins and Kimura 1997). Furthermore, a study by Jansen-Osmann and Heil (2007) did not find sex/gender differences in the speed of mental rotation of 3D cube figures, disconfirming the importance of dimensionality in sex/gender differences. Apart from dimensionality, the size of the rotation angle, the number of rotation axes, and the complexity of the stimuli also contribute to the male advantage (Caissie et al. 2009). Other task factors that might enhance the sex/gender difference in MR are stimulus shape (Amorim et al. 2006; Jansen-Osmann and Heil 2007), stimulus color (Rahe et al. 2022), and response format (e.g., whether the number of correct answers per item is constant) (Hirnstein et al. 2009).Psychometric MR tasks are usually administered with time constraints. Peters (2005) argued that including a time constraint of any duration makes the task more ecologically valid, as perceptual speed is relevant to spatial abilities in a real-life environment. Time-constrained MR tasks produce larger sex/gender differences than MR tasks administered with no time limits (Peters 2005; Voyer 2011). As sex/gender differences are not eliminated when administered with no time constraints, this suggests that other task-related factors affect the sex/gender difference too (Voyer 2011). However, it is clear that time constraint is one critical factor in MR tasks that will usually amplify the size of the sex/gender difference. Notably, chronometric MR tests, which measure reaction time when identifying whether an object is a rotated or mirrored version of another without a time limit, do not tend to show sex/gender differences (Rahe et al. 2019).It should be noted that task-related factors can only partially explain sex/gender differences in mental rotation, which are still not fully understood (Halpern and LaMay 2000). A slightly different perspective on how to answer this research question has been offered by studies investigating biological, social, and psychological factors that may affect sex/gender differences in mental rotation performance. Although there is no doubt that biological factors such as sex hormones (Hausmann et al. 2000; Miller and Halpern 2014) and individual differences in structural and functional brain organization (e.g., Hausmann 2017; Hirnstein et al. 2019), social factors such as gender stereotypes (e.g., Halpern et al. 2007; Hausmann 2014), and the interaction between biological and social factors (e.g., Josephs et al. 2003; Wraga et al. 2007; Hausmann et al. 2009) contribute to sex/gender differences in spatial abilities, psychological factors are frequently neglected. This is surprising, as psychological factors have been shown to be particularly good candidates for elucidating interindividual and sex/gender differences in spatial abilities in general and MR in particular.The current study aimed to replicate the well-known sex/gender difference in MR performance and to investigate to what extent individual differences in psychological factors spatial anxiety and self-confidence contribute to and mediate the effect of sex/gender on MR performance when task demands are high and low. To achieve this, the present study included the more demanding Revised Vandenberg and Kuse Mental Rotations Tests (version MRT-A) (Peters 1995), which involve 2D drawings of 3D cube figures (Shepard and Metzler 1971), and the less demanding Mirror Pictures task—a 2D mental rotation test and subtest of the WILDE-Intelligenz-Test (Jäger and Althoff 1983). Self-confidence was measured on item level of each test. Trait spatial anxiety was measured with a questionnaire after cognitive testing.Self-confidence (i.e., the certainty that the participant''s responses are correct) is known to be generally higher in men than in women, especially in evaluation settings (Lenney 1977). Men''s higher self-confidence in their visuospatial performance even occurred when sex/gender differences in spatial performance were not observed (Ariel et al. 2018). However, self-confidence was positively correlated with MR performance (Cooke-Simpson and Voyer 2007). Given that men showed higher self-confidence in MR tasks compared with women, this might partly explain why men on average outperformed women in this study. The sex/gender difference in MR self-confidence was replicated by Estes and Felker (2012), who also found that self-confidence significantly mediated the sex/gender difference in MR performance; that is, more self-confident men revealed higher MR scores than women (Estes and Felker 2012). Furthermore, the positive relationship between self-confidence and MR performance was stronger in men than in women. These studies usually neglected psychological traits that might affect both individuals’ self-confidence and MR performance.Spatial anxiety is a domain-specific anxiety defined by negative thoughts and feelings when performing spatial tasks (Lawton 1994; Ramirez et al. 2012). A construct similar but not identical to spatial anxiety is self-efficacy, which has been defined as the belief in one''s own ability to perform a task (Bandura 1994). Spatial self-efficacy was positively correlated with MR performance in both men and women (Towle et al. 2005). Sex/gender differences in spatial anxiety emerged in children aged 6–12 yr (Lauer et al. 2018) and continued in adulthood (Lawton 1994). Women and girls showed significantly higher spatial anxiety than men and boys (Lawton 1994; Lauer et al. 2018; Alvarez-Vargas et al. 2020). Different aspects of spatial anxiety include navigation anxiety and spatial mental manipulation anxiety (Lyons et al. 2018). Navigation anxiety is defined by negative thoughts when attempting tasks involving directions and wayfinding. Mental manipulation anxiety is an anxiety surrounding spatial visualization, mental rotation, and imagined movement of abstract 3D objects, and hence reflects the demands of MR tasks. Women showed significantly higher navigation and mental manipulation anxiety than men (Lyons et al. 2018). Some evidence of a negative correlation between spatial anxiety and MR performance has been previously shown, with a recent study finding that spatial anxiety and not trait anxiety partially mediated the effect of sex/gender on MR performance; that is, women, higher in spatial anxiety than men, obtained lower performances (Alvarez-Vargas et al. 2020). When looking at within-scale factors identified with exploratory factor analysis, MR and navigation anxiety significantly mediated the effect of sex/gender on MR performance. However, the effect of sex/gender remained significant despite the effects of MR/navigation anxiety. Additionally, a moderate negative correlation between spatial anxiety and MR performance was found in children aged 6–12 yr, suggesting that the detrimental effect of spatial anxiety on MR performance might develop relatively early on (Lauer et al. 2018). Overall, these findings suggest that spatial anxiety is a key factor mediating sex/gender differences in MR. However, the precise mechanism through which spatial anxiety affects MR performance remains unclear.We hypothesized that men outperform women, especially in the more demanding MRT (hypothesis 1). We also predicted that, on average, women show higher spatial anxiety and lower self-confidence compared with men (hypothesis 2). Critically, it was hypothesized that the sex/gender difference in MR performance are mediated by the sex/gender differences in spatial anxiety and self-confidence, especially when task demands are high (hypothesis 3). Finally, in a series of exploratory analyses, we examined the sex/gender difference in self-confidence at the item level as well as in MR performance at each level of self-confidence (and spatial anxiety).     

Bodies and occlusion: Item types,cognitive processes,and gender differences in mental rotation

The aim of the current study was to reexamine previous findings in which the magnitude of the male advantage in mental rotation abilities increased when participants mentally rotated occluded versus nonoccluded items and decreased when participants mentally rotated human figures versus blocks. Mainly, the study aimed to address methodological issues noted on previous human figure mental rotations tests as the items composed of blocks and human body were probably not equivalent in terms of their cognitive requirements. Our results did not support previous research on embodied cognition as mental rotation performance decreased among both men and women when mentally rotating human figures compared to block items. However, for women, the effect of occlusion was decreased when mentally rotating human figures. Results are discussed in terms of task difficulty and gender differences in confidence and guessing behaviour.     

Improving spatial abilities through mindfulness: effects on the mental rotation task

In this study, we demonstrate a previously unknown finding that mindful learning can improve an individual’s spatial cognition without regard to gender differences. Thirty-two volunteers participated in the experiment. Baselines for spatial ability were first measured for the reaction time on the mental rotation task. Next, the participants were randomly assigned to either a mindful or mindless learning condition. After learning, the mental rotation task showed that those in the mindful learning condition responded faster than those in the mindless learning condition. This study provides promising evidence for applying mindful learning to education.     

Object-based and egocentric mental rotation performance in older adults: The importance of gender differences and motor ability

In this study, mental rotation performance was assessed in both an object-based task, human figures and letters as stimuli, and in an egocentric-based task, a human figure as a stimulus, in 60 older persons between 60 and 71 years old (30 women, 30 men). Additionally all participants completed three motor tests measuring balance and mobility. The results show that the reaction time was slower for letters than for both human figure tasks and the mental rotation speed was faster over all for egocentric mental rotation tasks. Gender differences were found in the accuracy measurement, favoring males, and were independent of stimulus type, kind of transformation, and angular disparity. Furthermore, a regression analysis showed that the accuracy rate for object-based transformations with body stimuli could be predicted by gender and balance ability. This study showed that the mental rotation performance in older adults depends on stimulus type, kind of transformation, and gender and that performance partially relates to motor ability.     

Sex differences in mental rotation strategy

When humans decide whether two visual stimuli are identical or mirror images of each other and one of the stimuli is rotated with respect to the other, the time discrimination takes usually increases as a rectilinear function of the orientation disparity. On the average, males perform this mental rotation at a faster angular speed than females. This experiment required the rotation of both mirror-image-different and non-mirror-different stimuli. The polygonal stimuli were presented in either spatially unfiltered, high-pass or low-pass filtered versions. All stimulus conditions produced mental rotation-type effects but with graded curvilinear trends. Women rotated faster than men under all conditions, an infrequent outcome in mental rotation studies. Overall, women yielded more convexly curvilinear response functions than men. For both sexes the curvilinearity was more pronounced under the non-mirror-different, low-pass stimulus condition than under the mirror different, high-pass stimulus condition. The results are considered as supporting the occurrence of two different mental rotation strategies and as suggesting that the women were predisposed to use efficiently an analytic feature rotation strategy, while the men were predisposed to employ efficiently a holistic pattern rotation strategy. It is argued that the overall design of this experiment promoted the application of an analytic strategy and thus conferred an advantage to the female participants.     

Developmental differences in mental rotation.

A reaction time paradigm was used to investigate developmental differences in ability to rotate and compare imaginal representations. Third grade, fifth grade, and college students (ages 9, 11, and 20 years, respectively) were required to determine whether a letter of the alphabet was presented in its backward or normal position. Letters were presented at 0, 60, 120, 180, 240, or 300° orientations from upright. Subjects were given no advance information about a test letter, or they were given identity and orientation information. In the no information condition, reaction time increased for all age groups as a function of the departure in orientation of the test letter from an upright position. In the advance information condition, reaction time remained uniform across orientation for only the college subjects. The developmental implications of these findings are discussed.     

Individual differences in spatial relation processing: effects of strategy, ability, and gender

Numerous studies have focused on the distinction between categorical and coordinate spatial relations. Categorical relations are propositional and abstract, and often related to a left hemisphere advantage. Coordinate relations specify the metric information of the relative locations of objects, and can be linked to right hemisphere processing. Yet, not all studies have reported such a clear double dissociation; in particular the categorical left hemisphere advantage is not always reported. In the current study we investigated whether verbal and spatial strategies, verbal and spatial cognitive abilities, and gender could account for the discrepancies observed in hemispheric lateralization of spatial relations. Seventy-five participants performed two visual half field, match-to-sample tasks (Van der Ham, van Wezel, Oleksiak, & Postma, 2007; Van der Ham, Raemaekers, van Wezel, Oleksiak, and Postma, 2009) to study the lateralization of categorical and coordinate relation processing. For each participant we determined the strategy they used in each of the two tasks. Consistent with previous findings, we found an overall categorical left hemisphere advantage and coordinate right hemisphere advantage. The lateralization pattern was affected selectively by the degree to which participants used a spatial strategy and by none of the other variables (i.e., verbal strategy, cognitive abilities, and gender). Critically, the categorical left hemisphere advantage was observed only for participants that relied strongly on a spatial strategy. This result is another piece of evidence that categorical spatial relation processing relies on spatial and not verbal processes.     

Real three-dimensional objects: effects on mental rotation

The current experiment investigated real three-dimensional (3D) objects with regard to performance on a mental rotation task and whether the appearance of sex differences may be mediated by experiences with spatially related activities. 40 men and 40 women were presented with alternating timed trials consisting of real-3D objects or two-dimensional illustrations of 3D objects. Sex differences in spatially related activities did not significantly influence the finding that men outperformed women on mental rotation of either stimulus type. However, on measures related to spatial activities, self-reported proficiency using maps correlated positively with performance only on trials with illustrations whereas self-reported proficiency using GPS correlated negatively with performance regardless of stimulus dimensionality. Findings may be interpreted as suggesting that rotating real-3D objects utilizes distinct but overlapping spatial skills compared to rotating two-dimensional representations of 3D objects, and real-3D objects can enhance mental rotation performance.     

Individual differences in spatial mental imagery

In this article, we report a new image-scanning paradigm that allowed us to measure objectively individual differences in spatial mental imagery—specifically, imagery for location. Participants were asked to determine whether an arrow was pointing at a dot using a visual mental image of an array of dots. The degree of precision required to discriminate “yes” from “no” trials was varied. In Experiment 1, the time to scan increasing distances, as well as the number of errors, increased when greater precision was required to make a judgement. The results in Experiment 2 replicated those results while controlling for possible biases. When greater precision is required, the accuracy of the spatial image becomes increasingly important—and hence the effect of precision in the task reflects the accuracy of the image. In Experiment 3, this measure was shown to be related to scores on the Paper Folding test, on the Paper Form Board test, and on the visuospatial items on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices—but not to scores on questionnaires measuring object–based mental imagery. Thus, we provide evidence that classical standardized spatial tests rely on spatial mental imagery but not object mental imagery.     

Hemisphere differences for components of mental rotation

The hemispheric functional lateralization of components of mental rotation performance was investigated. Twenty right-handed males were presented with rotated alphanumerics and unfamiliar characters in the left or right visual field. Subjects decided if the laterally presented stimulus was identical to or a mirror image of a center standard stimulus. Reaction time and errors were measured. Previous mental rotation findings were replicated and the visual field variable produced significant effects for both dependent measures. An overall right visual field advantage was observed in the latency data, suggesting a left hemisphere superiority for at least one component process of the task. A significant interaction in the error data showed that alphanumerics produced less errors in the right visual field than in the left visual field, consistent with a left hemisphere superiority for processing verbal symbolic material. No such hemispheric difference in accuracy was found for unfamiliar characters.     

Personality patterns of suicide attempters: gender differences in Ukraine

In the present study, an attempt has been made to investigate the complete 'pattern' of a suicide attempter (SA) within the set of Big Five traits. Two models were used: M1, which includes the five main dimensions of Big Five in the analysis; and M2, which includes facets of those dimensions which were identified as important in M1. The study consisted of a group of SA (men - 326, women - 299) and a group of healthy volunteers (HV) (men - 143, women - 190) with a similar age range. Discriminant analysis (DA) showed that the factors most significant in discriminating the personality pattern of a male SA are (in decreasing order): (E) Extraversion, (N) Neuroticism, (C) Conscientiousness and (O) Openness; and for a female SA these factors were (E) Extraversion, (C) Conscientiousness and (A) Agreeableness. In M2 for men, the largest contribution to pattern recognition is (N3) Depression. Moreover, in M2 for men significant characteristics were (in descending order): (E6) Positive Emotions, (O1) Fantasy, (E4) Activity, and also (N2) Angry Hostility, (C3) Dutifulness, (C4) Achievement Striving, (C2) Order and (O6) Values; and for women: (E4) Activity, (C6) Deliberation, (C2) Order, (A6) Tender-Mindedness, (E5) Excitement Seeking, (E6) Positive Emotions, (C4) Achievement Striving, (A2) Straightforwardness, (C5) Self-Discipline and (E1) Warmth. Analysis of the obtained data demonstrates that suicide attempts amongst males, can largely be associated with personality variables reflecting negative emotions; while female suicide attempts are primarily associated with variables regarding activity and self-regulation.     

Frames and images: sequential effects in mental rotation

Recent studies have shown that response time in mental rotation increases with the angular deviation between the current and preceding stimuli, suggesting a frame rotation process in which the intrinsic frame of the previous stimulus is brought into congruence with the coordinates of the current stimulus. In contrast, we show that this process involves image rotation in which the present stimulus is brought into alignment with the orientation of the previous stimulus. Such "backward alignment" succeeds only for shape-preserving sequences (i.e., identical stimuli at different orientations). Four experiments show that the backward alignment process (a) competes with the uprighting process typically found in mental rotation, and the response is determined by the process requiring the shortest rotational path; (b) is related to the tendency to repeat the previous response; (c) is insensitive to the position of the vertical; (d) is indifferent to the representation of the stimulus in long term memory; and (e) is different from the process underlying preparation for a stimulus in a specified orientation.