Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2024 Jun;77(6):1250-1271. doi: 10.1177/17470218231200127. Epub 2023 Oct 13.
Sex differences in mental rotation performance are one of the largest in cognitive psychology. Men outperform women by up to 1 in psychometric mental rotation tests, but it is often neglected that there are no or only small sex differences for chronometric tests. As both tests are supposed to measure the same ability, we suspect some features of the tests themselves to affect sex differences in performance. Following a theoretical review of the test features, we evaluate the effects of the number of possible answer alternatives, whether they are presented as pairwise mirrored, and their interaction on sex differences in mental rotation performance. In an online experiment, 838 German-speaking participants, 421 women, 417 men, = 42.58 ( = 12.54) years, solved four blocks of mental rotation trials with two or eight alternatives, which were either pairwise mirrored or not. The results show that that the overall performance was lower for more alternatives and for mixed alternatives but not for their interaction. We could not determine explanations for sex differences as we did not observe meaningful sex differences at all. Possible reasons include the differences between men and women in age and education. This study suggests that the differences between tests affect performance. Sex differences, however, need more investigation, including possible effects and interactions of the test design, education, and age.
性别的心理旋转表现差异是认知心理学中最大的差异之一。在心理计量学心理旋转测试中，男性的表现优于女性，最多可达 1 ，但通常忽略了计时测试中没有或只有很小的性别差异。由于这两种测试都被认为是测量相同的能力，我们怀疑测试本身的某些特征会影响表现的性别差异。在对测试特征进行理论回顾之后，我们评估了可能答案选择的数量、它们是否作为成对镜像呈现以及它们之间的相互作用对心理旋转表现的性别差异的影响。在一项在线实验中，838 名讲德语的参与者，421 名女性，417 名男性，= 42.58（= 12.54）岁，解决了四个包含两个或八个选项的心理旋转试验块，这些选项要么是成对镜像的，要么不是。结果表明，选项越多，混合选项的整体表现越低，但两者之间没有交互作用。我们不能确定性别差异的解释，因为我们根本没有观察到有意义的性别差异。可能的原因包括男性和女性在年龄和教育方面的差异。本研究表明，测试之间的差异会影响表现。然而，性别差异需要更多的研究，包括测试设计、教育和年龄的可能影响和相互作用。
