Resnick S M
Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania.
Brain Cogn. 1993 Jan;21(1):71-9. doi: 10.1006/brcg.1993.1005.
It has been argued that the male performance advantage on the Mental Rotations Test, a measure of three-dimensional rotational ability, reflects a slower problem-solving strategy in females. A recent study of a high-ability sample suggested that sex differences do not reach significance when the test is administered without time limits (Goldstein, Haldane, & Mitchell, 1990). To further explore the effects of time limits, unspeeded versions of the Mental Rotations Test and a vocabulary test were administered to 88 males and 94 females, who represented a less restricted range of ability levels. Males obtained significantly higher scores than females on the Mental Rotations Test (p = .0001), despite comparable performance for the two groups on the vocabulary test. In addition, distributions of Mental Rotations scores were significantly different, with greater proportions of men at the high and women at the low ends. Thus, a difference in speed of problem solving strategy is not a sufficient explanation of the sex difference on the Mental Rotations Test.
有人认为，男性在心理旋转测试（一种三维旋转能力的测量方法）中的表现优势反映出女性解决问题的策略较慢。最近一项针对高能力样本的研究表明，在无时间限制的情况下进行测试时，性别差异并不显著（戈尔茨坦、霍尔丹和米切尔，1990年）。为了进一步探究时间限制的影响，对88名男性和94名女性进行了无时间限制版本的心理旋转测试和词汇测试，这些人代表了能力水平限制较小的范围。尽管两组在词汇测试中的表现相当，但男性在心理旋转测试中的得分显著高于女性（p = 0.0001）。此外，心理旋转测试分数的分布存在显著差异，高分段男性的比例更高，低分段女性的比例更高。因此，解决问题策略的速度差异并不能充分解释心理旋转测试中的性别差异。
