Mental rotation performance and the effect of gender in fourth graders and adults

Whereas a gender effect favouring males in adults' mental rotation performance can be reliably found, the respective gender effect in children's performance does not appear consistently in the literature. Therefore, this study investigated whether there is a “crucial” time slot on infantile development when a gender effect is detectable. Following Johnson and Meade's (1987 Johnson, E. S. and Meade, A. C. 1987. Developmental patterns of spatial ability: An early sex difference. Child Development, 58: 725–740. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) hypothesis that age ten might be crucial, we investigated 96 fourth graders—split into two age groups (mean: 9.3 vs. 10.3 years)—and 48 adults that performed the MRT (Peters et al., 1995 Peters, M., Laeng, B., Latham, K., Jackson, M., Zaiyouna, R. and Richardson, C. 1995. A redrawn Vandenberg and Kuse mental rotations test: Different versions and factors that affect performance. Brain and Cognition, 28: 39–58. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We observed large gender effects in older children as well as in adults. However, the younger children did not reveal a significant gender effect, although effect sizes indicated a small-to-medium effect. Surprisingly, the performance of women, older girls, and younger girls did not differ significantly, whereas older boys and adults clearly outperformed younger boys. Possible reasons for these effects are discussed.