Wei Wei, Chen Chuansheng, Zhou Xinlin
Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang UniversityHangzhou, China; State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Siegler Center for Innovative Learning, Beijing Normal UniversityBeijing, China.
Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine CA, USA.
Front Psychol. 2016 Mar 7;7:306. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00306. eCollection 2016.
Previous research has shown that females consistently outperform males in exact arithmetic, perhaps due to the former's advantage in language processing. Much less is known about gender difference in approximate arithmetic. Given that approximate arithmetic is closely associated with visuospatial processing, which shows a male advantage we hypothesized that males would perform better than females in approximate arithmetic. In two experiments (496 children in Experiment 1 and 554 college students in Experiment 2), we found that males showed better performance in approximate arithmetic, which was accounted for by gender differences in spatial ability.
先前的研究表明，在精确算术方面，女性的表现一直优于男性，这可能是由于前者在语言处理方面的优势。关于近似算术方面的性别差异，人们了解得要少得多。鉴于近似算术与视觉空间处理密切相关，而视觉空间处理显示出男性优势，我们假设在近似算术方面男性的表现会优于女性。在两项实验中（实验1有496名儿童，实验2有554名大学生），我们发现男性在近似算术方面表现更好，这是由空间能力的性别差异造成的。
