Cueing the interpretation of a Necker Cube: a way to inspect fundamental cognitive processes

The term perceptual bistability refers to all those conditions in which an observer looks at an ambiguous stimulus that can have two or more distinct but equally reliable interpretations. In this work, we investigate perception of Necker Cube in which bistability consists of the possibility to interpret the cube depth in two different ways. We manipulated the cube ambiguity by darkening one of the cube faces (cue) to provide a clear cube interpretation due to the occlusion depth index. When the position of the cue is stationary the cube perceived perspective is steady and driven by the cue position. However, when we alternated in time the cue position (i.e. we changed the position of the darkened cube face) two different perceptual phenomena occurred: for low frequencies the cube perspective alternated in line with the position of the cue; however for high frequencies the cue was no longer able to bias the perception but it appears as a floating feature traveling across the solid with the cube whole perspective that returns to be bistable as in the conventional, bias-free, case.     

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).     

Cueing the interpretation of a Necker Cube: a way to inspect fundamental cognitive processes

The term perceptual bistability refers to all those conditions in which an observer looks at an ambiguous stimulus that can have two or more distinct but equally reliable interpretations. In this work, we investigate perception of Necker Cube in which bistability consists of the possibility to interpret the cube depth in two different ways. We manipulated the cube ambiguity by darkening one of the cube faces (cue) to provide a clear cube interpretation due to the occlusion depth index. When the position of the cue is stationary the cube perceived perspective is steady and driven by the cue position. However, when we alternated in time the cue position (i.e. we changed the position of the darkened cube face) two different perceptual phenomena occurred: for low frequencies the cube perspective alternated in line with the position of the cue; however for high frequencies the cue was no longer able to bias the perception but it appears as a floating feature traveling across the solid with the cube whole perspective that returns to be bistable as in the conventional, bias-free, case.     

The Heroes and the Helpless: The Development of Benevolent Sexism in Children

Sex Roles - Gender-stereotypical attitudes that males should be the protectors and that females need special care as the more delicate gender may reflect foundational components of benevolent...     

Perceived acceptability of anorexia and bulimia in women with and without eating disorder symptoms

Perceptions of the acceptability of eating‐disordered behaviour were examined in young adult women with (n = 44) and without (n = 268) eating disorder symptoms. All participants viewed vignettes of anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) and responded to the same series of questions—addressing different possible ways in which the conditions described might be seen to be acceptable—in relation to each vignette. Participants with eating disorder symptoms perceived eating‐disordered behaviour to be more acceptable than asymptomatic participants, and this was the case for both AN and BN vignettes and for a range of different items. Differences on items tapping the perception that it ‘might not be too bad’ to have an eating disorder and that an eating disorder is ‘nothing to be concerned about’ were particularly pronounced. The findings could not be accounted for by between‐group differences in body weight. The findings indicate the ambivalence towards eating‐disordered behaviour that exists among a subgroup of young women in the community and the clear association between such ambivalence and actual eating disorder symptoms. The perceived acceptability of eating‐disordered behaviour may need to be addressed in prevention and early‐intervention programs for eating disorders.