Abstract
Numerous studies have demonstrated that boys throw balls faster, farther and more accurately than girls. This may be largely due to well-known anatomical and muscle-physiological differences that play a central role in overarm throwing. With the objective to understand the potential contribution of the equally essential coordinative aspects in throwing for this gender difference, this large cross-sectional study examined a simplified forearm throw that eliminated the requirements that give males an advantage.While the overall performance error indeed became similar in the age groups younger than 20 years and older than 50 years, it was attenuated for middle-aged individuals. The gender differences remained in individuals who reported no throwing experience, but females with throwing experience reached similar performance as males. Two fine-grained spatiotemporal metrics displayed similar age-dependent gender disparities: while overall, males showed better spatiotemporal coordination of the ball release, age group comparisons specified that it was particularly middle-aged females that made more timing errors and did not develop a noise-tolerant strategy as males did. As throwing experience did not explain this age-dependency, the results are discussed in the context of spatial abilities and video game experience, both more pronounced in males. In contrast, a measure of rhythmicity developed over successive throws only revealed weak gender differences, speaking to the fundamental tendency in humans to fall into rhythmic patterns. Only the youngest individuals between 5 and 9 years of age showed significantly less rhythmicity in their performance. This computational study was performed in a large cohort in the context of an outreach activity, demonstrating that robust quantitative measures can also be obtained in less controlled environments. The findings also alert that motor neuroscience may need to pay more attention to gender differences.
Highlights
Gender differences have been the mainstay in the developmental literature on motor, sensory, and cognitive abilities in children from early childhood to adolescence and early adulthood
A meta-analysis of 64 studies on a large set of sensorimotor skills by Thomas and French (1985) reported that throwing differed significantly from other skills: boys outperformed girls by 1.5 standard deviations as early as 4–7 years, and by 12 years, boys outperformed girls by over 3.5 standard deviations. These results suggest that differences in throwing ability were unlikely to be completely rooted in nurture or environmental causes
We argue that to gain more insights into the observed differences between genders it is useful to tease apart the complex task of throwing into its essential elements
Summary
Gender differences have been the mainstay in the developmental literature on motor, sensory, and cognitive abilities in children from early childhood to adolescence and early adulthood. Given the evolutionary division of labor into male hunters and female gatherers and the persistent gender stereotypies in education, this finding has invariably raised the issue of nature vs nurture (Lombardo and Deaner, 2018a,b). In contrast to this literature, studies in motor neuroscience have largely side-stepped the question of sex differences and it has been regarded good practice to average over both represented genders. The present study examined an experimentally simplified throwing task to further probe into the coordinative differences between males and females using quantitative motor neuroscience methods
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