Motor affordance or gender-stereotyped nature of physical activity – what is more important for the mental rotation performance of female athletes?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The main goal of this study is to examine the relationship between mental rotation performance of female athletes and sports that are gender stereotyped and show different motor demand profiles. 94 female athletes (handball, combat sport, sport students) participated in an egocentric and object-based mental rotation task using figures of human body stimuli presented in front or back view. Rather male-stereotyped combat sports include many body rotations with changing motion patterns, female sport students learn many new exercises in different types of sport (female stereotyped), handball training (non-stereotyped) contains mainly cardiovascular and tactical challenges. The main result was that a long-term specific sporting expertise is more important for mental rotation performance than the gender-stereotyped sport classification even if gender-role differences are included as covariate. This indicates, that for women specific motor components seem to be more important for the development of mental rotation ability than gender-stereotype aspects.