Sex of human stimulus matters: female and male stimuli are processed differently in mental rotation tasks. Issue 8 (17th November 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kaltner, Sandra; Jansen, Petra
• Is Part Of: Journal of cognitive psychology. Volume 30:Issue 8(2018)
• Page Start: 854
• Page End: 862
• Publication Date: 2018-11-17
• Subjects: Mental rotation -- gender differences -- embodied stimuli -- self-related processes; Cognitive psychology -- Periodicals; 153.05
• DOI: 10.1080/20445911.2018.1530677
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2044-5911

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The main goal of the present study was to assess whether the sex of a human stimulus affects mental rotation performance. The results are pretty straight-forward: Men show a better performance than women and also male stimuli result in a faster processing by both women and men compared to female stimuli. Furthermore, the advantage of egocentric transformations over object-based transformations disappeared for females in difficult tasks using female stimuli. This experiment gives a hint that women are affected to a greater extent from the sex of the presented stimuli compared to men. The underlying mechanisms need to be investigated in future research.