Feature Story

December 9, 2008

Psychologists report that a gender gap in spatial skills starts in infancy

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

Now, developmental psychologists at Pitzer College and UCLA have discovered that this type of spatial skill is present in infancy and can be found in boys as young as 5 months old.

While women tend to be stronger verbally than men, many studies have shown that adult men have an advantage in the ability to imagine complex objects visually and to mentally rotate them.

"Infants as young as 5 months can perform the skill, but only boys --- at least in our study."

"We've known for approximately 30 years that men and women can see an object from one perspective and then recognize that object after it has been rotated in space into a new position," said David S. Moore, professor of psychology at Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University, both in Claremont, Calif., and an expert in the development of perception and cognition in infants.

Previous studies have shown that this sex difference can be detected in children as young as 4 years of age, but our study is the first to have successfully found a way to assess the situation in young infants.

"Although we did not expect to find any sex differences in babies this young, our results suggest that the 5-month-old boys in our study used mental rotation to complete our task while the 5-month-old girls in our study did not," Moore said.

However, with most psychological characteristics, Johnson and Moore note, there are no differences between groups of men and groups of women.

Once the infants were bored with the object, the researchers showed them the same object from a different vantage point, and then the mirror image of the object.

Read more from this post.