The Relationship Between Gender, Experience and Spatial Ability in Children

Abstract

Spatial ability has been studied extensively in the last years. The available studies provide conflicting results that can be attributed to the complexity of variables influencing spatial abilities sex differences. In the present study we tried to evaluate the magnitude of gender differences in visuo-spatial tasks and to relate the results with two areas of experience: school major and computer use. We were also interested in how psychometric test-performance correlate with school grade. Three hundred and three students (14.2 years as mean age) were investigated with a battery focused on figural cognitive processing. In general, we found that boys outperform girls on mental rotation, spatial orientation, image generation, and blocks tests. School major and time spent using computers are related with visuo-spatial test results, but school grades are not a powerful predictor of tests’ performance. The findings are discussed in the light of future investigations.