Abstract
Sex differences have been reported for a variety of cognitive tasks and related to the use of different cognitive processing styles in men and women. It was recently argued that these processing styles share some characteristics across tasks, i.e. male approaches are oriented towards holistic stimulus aspects and female approaches are oriented towards stimulus details. In that respect, sex-dependent cognitive processing styles share similarities with attentional global-local processing. A direct relationship between cognitive processing and global-local processing has however not been previously established. In the present study, 49 men and 44 women completed a Navon paradigm and a Kimchi Palmer task as well as a navigation task and a verbal fluency task with the goal to relate the global advantage (GA) effect as a measure of global processing to holistic processing styles in both tasks. Indeed participants with larger GA effects displayed more holistic processing during spatial navigation and phonemic fluency. However, the relationship to cognitive processing styles was modulated by the specific condition of the Navon paradigm, as well as the sex of participants. Thus, different types of global-local processing play different roles for cognitive processing in men and women.
Highlights
Sex differences have been reported for a variety of cognitive tasks and related to the use of different cognitive processing styles in men and women
It was hypothesized that a general tendency towards global processing should translate into a more holistic processing style during cognitive tasks, whereas a general tendency towards local processing should translate into a more detail-oriented processing style during cognitive tasks
We found that global-local processing was related to (i) the perspective effect during spatial navigation and (ii) clustering during phonemic fluency
Summary
Sex differences have been reported for a variety of cognitive tasks and related to the use of different cognitive processing styles in men and women. Sex differences favoring women have been documented for verbal fluency and verbal memory tasks[2] These sex differences have previously been related to men and women processing the presented stimulus materials in different ways, which has often been referred to as the use of different cognitive strategies. The term strategy can imply a component of awareness, i.e. participants deliberately choosing to process the stimulus material a certain way As this is not necessarily the case in all of the tasks for which sex differences were described, we will use the term processing style instead. In spatial navigation tasks, men tend to take a more allocentric perspective and use a more Euclidian approach, while women tend to take a more egocentric perspective and landmark-based approach[4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. For number comparison tasks, it has been reported that women use a more decomposed approach of comparing single digits, while men use a more holistic approach of comparing multi-digit numbers as a whole, irrespective of whether sex differences in overall performance were observed[14]
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