ABSTRACT
The main goal of the present study was to assess whether the sex of a human stimulus affects mental rotation performance. The results are pretty straight-forward: Men show a better performance than women and also male stimuli result in a faster processing by both women and men compared to female stimuli. Furthermore, the advantage of egocentric transformations over object-based transformations disappeared for females in difficult tasks using female stimuli. This experiment gives a hint that women are affected to a greater extent from the sex of the presented stimuli compared to men. The underlying mechanisms need to be investigated in future research.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Isabella Peter for her help during data acquisition.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.