Department of Psychology and Health Research Centre, University of Almería, Almería, Spain.
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy; Cognitive and Motor Rehabilitation and Neuroimaging Unit, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy.
Handb Clin Neurol. 2020;175:65-79. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-444-64123-6.00006-0.
Spatial skills represent an important part of our cognitive processes and have been widely studied in the last decades. The term "spatial skills" includes several abilities, some of them clearly sexually dimorphic. Thus men usually perform better than women in mental rotation and spatial orientation tasks, whereas women outperform men in object location memory tests. Skills like visualization and perception could account for these differences, but they could also be modulated by the cognitive style. Obviously, disease can interfere in certain brain structures underlying learning and memory, thus altering spatial abilities in both genders. In this chapter, spatial skills and sexual dimorphism are briefly reviewed, focusing on processes underlying performance as well as models used to explain how we perceive information from the environment. The chapter also includes references to the brain, providing some cues regarding the anatomic regions underlying some of these behaviors.
空间技能代表了我们认知过程的一个重要部分，在过去几十年中得到了广泛的研究。“空间技能”一词包括几种能力，其中一些能力明显具有性别二态性。因此，男性在心理旋转和空间定向任务中的表现通常优于女性，而女性在物体位置记忆测试中的表现优于男性。像可视化和感知这样的技能可以解释这些差异，但它们也可能受到认知风格的调节。显然，疾病会干扰学习和记忆所必需的某些大脑结构，从而改变两性的空间能力。在本章中，简要回顾了空间技能和性别二态性，重点介绍了表现背后的过程以及用于解释我们如何感知环境信息的模型。本章还提到了大脑，为这些行为背后的一些解剖区域提供了一些线索。
