The relationships of spatial ability and sex to formal reasoning capabilities.

The relationships of spatial ability and sex to performance on formal reasoning tasks were examined for a group of 34 male and female college students. It was hypothesized that spatial ability is positively related to formal reasoning task performance which is also related to male superiority on formal reasoning task performance. Results indicated that spatial ability was unrelated to formal reasoning task performance and that sex differences occurred with the balance of task and the pendulum task which suggested that males were superior to females at manifesting the scheme of proportionality and at being able to isolate variables.