Sex differences in visuo-spatial ability: Task difficulty, speed-accuracy tradeoff, and other performance factors

Males have consistently been found to perform better than females on a task that requires the subject to mentally rotate a figure. Recently, Goldstein, Haldane, and Mitchell (1990) suggested that performance factors are operative in explaining sex differences in spatial ability. However, Stumpf (1993) was unable to replicate all of Goldstein et al.'s (1990) findings and to generalize them to other measures of spatial ability. In this study, it was hypothesized (1) that females would take longer to respond and would get fewer correct items than males on a spatial rotation task, and (2) that only females would show a speed-accuracy tradeoff as the difficulty of the spatial task increased from the 90 degrees to 180 degrees rotated conditions. The results confirmed each of these hypotheses. Furthermore, as Stumpf (1993) found, when ratio scores from the number of items correct to number attempted were computed for both males and females, differences in spatial ability were reduced, though still evident.