Gender differences in adult spatial information processing: Their relationship to pubertal timing, adolescent activities, and sex-typing of personality

Abstract

This study explored the contributions of pubertal timing, sex-role orientation, and childhood experiences to gender differences in adult spatial ability. Two-dimensional spatial orientation ability was assessed in 52 female and 38 male college students with both information-processing and paper-and-pencil tasks. Retrospective indices of pubertal timing and previous experiences with spatial-related activities, as well as measures of the subject's adult sex-role orientation were also obtained. The direction of influence inferred from the pattern of mean differences and the results of simple and multiple regression analyses suggest that gender differences in mental rotation rate as assessed by the information-processing measure are linked to gender differences in spatial-related adolescent experiences, and to a lesser extent, adolescent pubertal timing. On the other hand, gender differences in test accuracy did not appear to be significantly related to gender differences in maturational timing, adolescent activities, or adult sex-role orientation. Implications of these findings for the locus of gender differences in spatial ability and its potentially experiential nature are discussed.