Do Gender-Related Stereotypes Affect Spatial Performance? Exploring When, How and to Whom Using a Chronometric Two-Choice Mental Rotation Task

It is a common belief that males have superior visuospatial abilities and that differences in this and other cognitive domains (e.g., math) contribute to the reduced interest and low representation of girls and women in STEM education and professions. However, previous studies show that gender-related implicit associations and explicit beliefs, as well as situational variables, might affect cognitive performance in those gender-stereotyped domains and produce between-gender spurious differences. Therefore, the present study aimed to provide information on when, how and who might be affected by the situational reactivation of stereotypic gender-science beliefs/associations while performing a 3D mental rotation chronometric task (3DMRT). More specifically, we assessed the explicit beliefs and implicit associations (by the Implicit Association Test) held by female and male students of humanities and STEM majors and compared their performance in a 3DMRT after receiving stereotype- congruent, incongruent and nullifying experimental instructions. Our results show that implicit stereotypic gender-science associations correlate with 3DMRT performance in both females and males, but that inter-gender differences emerge only under stereotype-reactivating conditions. We also found that changes in self-confidence mediate these instructions’ effects and that academic specialization moderates them, hence promoting 3DMRT performance differences between male and female humanities, but not STEM, students. Taken together, these observations suggest that the common statement “males have superior mental rotation abilities” simplifies a much more complex reality and might promote stereotypes which, in turn, might induce artefactual performance differences between females and males in such tasks.

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.