Gender
Differences in Mental Rotation Ability in Three Cultures: Ireland,
Ecuador and Japan
M. Flaherty |
Literature
on mental rotation tasks consistently reports that males perform
better than females. The current study is an attempt to scrutinize
the influence of culture and experience with spatial activities in
performance on a mental rotation test. The participants were 115
Ecuadorians, 120 Irish Caucasians and 128 Japanese. Half the participants
In each group were male and half were female. They completed the
Group Mental Rotation Test (GMRT) and a Spatial Activities Questionnaire
(SAQ). Males outperformed females on the GMRT in all three cultures.
Participation in "masculine activities" from the SAQ correlated
with high GMRT scores, in "feminine activities" with low
GMRT scores. There was a main effect of nationality; subjects from
Ireland and Japan scored higher than their counterparts in Ecuador.
The implications of the nationality effect raises questions about
the widely accepted stability of the gender difference in spatial
ability. Key words: mental rotation, gender differences, cross-cultural study |