Differences in Visual Spatial Ability Among Females and Males
Running head: The differences in visual spatial ability among females and males
The differences in visual spatial ability among females and males:
Does practice have an effect on performance?
Abstract
Many scientists have studied the sex differences in spatial abilities. Different designs of testing have been used to test this subject. A simple Mental Rotation Test (MRT) was designed to test the spatial abilities of males verse females in identifying rotated objects. The test consisted of two trials to measure whether practice had an effect on performance. Nine males and 30 females participated in the spatial rotation test. Regardless of trials males perform significantly higher in spatial rotation tasks then females. The effect of trials had a positive effect on females and no effect on males. Female's scores increased after the first trial. Where as male's scores stayed consistent from trial one and trial two. The results suggest that male's complete spatial visualization task more accurately then females, although female's accuracy improves with practice.
Differences in Visual Spatial 3
The differences in visual spatial ability among females and males
Does Practice have an effect on performance
Throughout the past few decades Scientists have been studying spatial visualization among males and females. In many cases, males score significantly higher in this area and in others reports show no significant difference between males and females scores but do report that scores were higher in a specific gender. One of these studies is Schaefer and Thomas's (1998) study on spatial tasks and sex differences in gains from practice, tes...
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...ex differences in visuospatial ability: Do performance factors play such an important role. Memory & cognition 4, 504-510.
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Both male and female brains are different and extends into a difference of what they can
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Introduction The topic of gender differences must understandably be approached with caution in our modern world. Emotionally charged and fraught with ideas about political correctness, gender can be a difficult subject to address, particularly when discussed in correlation to behavior and social behavior. Throughout history, many people have strove to understand what makes men and women different. Until the modern era, this topic was generally left up to religious leaders and philosophers to discuss. However, with the acquisition of more specialized medical knowledge of human physiology and the advent of anthropology, we now know a great deal more about gender differences than at any other point in history.
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Although, there is proof of cognitive and mental variations in the way that two genders process information. For example, women are shown to be more adept at verbal communication and comprehension while men tend to perform better in the visual-spatial category. On the topic of memory, studies show that women are more sensory and memory oriented. In one study at the University of Edinburgh, psychologist Stuart Ritchie and a team of researchers compared data from many different male and female subjects. As Micheal Price states, “Adjusting for age, on average, they found that women tended to have significantly thicker cortices than men. Thicker cortices have been associated with higher scores on a variety of cognitive and general intelligence tests. Meanwhile, men had higher brain volumes than women in every subcortical region they looked at, including the hippocampus (which plays broad roles in memory and spatial awareness), the amygdala (emotions, memory, and decision-making), striatum (learning, inhibition, and reward-processing), and thalamus (processing and relaying sensory information to other parts of the brain).” (Price 2017). So indeed there are differences, however the similarities between genders far outweigh the differences. McGraw-Hill Higher Education argues that “More equivocal are gender differences in activity level, dependency, timidity, exploratory activity, and vulnerability to stress. There are no gender differences in sociability, conformity, achievement, self-esteem, or verbal hostility (Child Psychology).” In turn proving many once believed facts such as “women and men communicate differently, it's biology” into preconceived
Furthermore this article expands upon this subcategory of memory by describing the two types of tasks involved with it: verbal-production ta...
The way we conduct research and our findings over the past century have come a long way from the naïve beliefs about the mental abilities of women compared to men. Prior to the makings of meta-analysis, studies always concluded that there were no gender differences in general intelligence but favored the genders in certain abilities. With the use of meta-analysis, there were various amounts of conclusions that did show a small gender difference cognitive ability. Meta-analysis also helped Linn and Petersen discover that there were three distinctive spatial abilities: mental rotation, spatial perception, and spatial disembedding. Meta-analysis is a great tool to do an unbiased assessment on existing research on cognitive gender differences
In the mental rotation task, subjects are pre- sented with pairs of 2-D or 3-D shapes, and asked whether they are mirrored or non- mirrored.
Title: Gender Differences in Perception of Optical Illusions Background: The brain relies on visual cues to interpret the world around us, but sometimes these cues can lead to illusions. Retinal images are flat representations of a three-dimensional world, and our visual system must use powerful restraints to interpret them accurately. Illusions occur when these restraints fail, revealing the ambiguity of our perception.
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Communication is an essential part of human life. People perceive things in a different way because of ethnic background differences, attitudes and beliefs, etc. These differences may affect our ability to communicate with our counterpart. Therefore, it is necessary to keep our mind open so that we can reduce the risk of communication breakdown. Men and women are different as everyone knows that. However, their differences are no just physiological and anatomical. Recent researches have concluded that there are remarkable differences between the two genders in the way their brains process information, language, emotion, cognition etc. Scientists have discovered the differences in the way men and women carry out mental functions like judging speed, estimating time, spatial visualization and positioning, mental calculation. Men and women are strikingly different not only in these tasks but also in the way their brains process language. This could account for the reason why there are overwhelmingly more male mathematicians, pilots, mechanical engineers, race car drivers and space scientists than females. On the other hand, there are areas in which women outperform men. Women are naturally endowed with better communication and verbal abilities. They are also effective than men in some of the tasks like emotional empathy, establishing human relations, carrying out pre-planned tasks and creative expressions (Kimura 1999).
It is proven that the male and female brains differ, but can one prove that it affects the behavior? Many scientists would agree that ones behavior is determined by his/her gender. Although others are convinced that social conditioning is the cause for the differences between the male and female, it is very unlikely that biological differences play no role in behavior. The male and female brains differ not only by how they work, but also on the size. For example, Natalie Angier and Kenneth Chang, neuroscientists, have shown that the women’s brain is about 10 percent smaller than the male’s, on average, even after accounting for women’s comparatively smaller body size. Three brain differences that affect ones behavior are the limbic size, the corpus collosum size, and the amount of gray and white matter.
7)TI: Mental rotation and the right hemisphere, Abstract of research findings regarding enhanced development of the right cerebral hemisphere and its connection to extreme intellectual giftedness.
Conner, Steve. "The Hardwired Difference between Male and Female Brains Could Explain Why Men Are 'better at Map Reading'" The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 03 Feb. 2013. Web.
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