Gender differences in mental rotation in Oman and Germany
Section snippets
Gender differences in mental rotation in Oman and Germany
Mental rotation is one of the best-investigated cognitive tasks, especially concerning gender differences. It is a mental transformation which describes the ability to imagine two or three-dimensional objects (Shepard & Metzler, 1971). This ability is related to other cognitive domains like problem solving (Geary, Saults, Liu, & Hoard, 2000) and mathematical knowledge (Hegarty & Kozhevnikov, 1999). Mental rotation is also critical to success in STEM disciplines (science, technology,
Participants
Participants were 119 students from one university in Germany, 56 males (mean age 22.89 years, SD = 2.87) and 61 females (mean age 21.56 years, SD = 1.69), and 120 students from one university in Oman, 62 males (mean age 20.79, years, SD = 1.36) and 59 females (mean age 20.20 years, SD = 1.15). The primary field of study of all students was Physical Education. Due to the fact that overweight children show a worse mental rotation performance than normal weight ones (Jansen, Schmelter, Kasten, & Heil, 2011)
Practicing of sports and music
The MANOVA for sports with the dependent variable “years spent practicing sports” revealed significant main effects for the factor “gender”, F(1, 159) = 11.02, p < 0.01, partial η2 = 0.065, and “group”, F(1, 161) = 314.077, p < 0.001, partial η2 = 0.66. Males practiced sports for more years than females, and the students in Oman are engaged in sports for a shorter period of time than those in Germany (see Table 1). Concerning the dependent variable “hours of sports practice per week” there was a
Discussion
This study has shown that students in Oman and Germany differ in their mental rotation performance. Gender differences exist in both samples, but there was no interaction between gender and group, which means the Oman group did not have the predicted higher gender effect compared to the German group. Furthermore, in this study physical activity does not relate to mental rotation performance in either sample.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Sandra Kaltner, Jürgen Kittsteiner, Jennifer Lehmann, and Khalifa Alfathi with their help during data collection acquisition. Furthermore, we thank Michel Peters for providing the MRT to us, and for the allowance to create an Arabic Version.
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2019, Brain and CognitionCitation Excerpt :Handedness was measured with the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldfield, 1971). To ensure that in the different handedness-classifications participants do not differ in respect to their cognitive processing speed and executive function, the Number Connection test (Zahlenverbindungstest, ZVT, Oswald & Roth, 1987), that shows high correlation to other tests of general intelligence (Vernon, 1993), was applied to measure processing speed and executive functions (compare e.g. Kaltner, Jansen, & Rieke, 2017; Jansen, Zayed, & Osmann, 2016). No one of the participants attended in a mental rotation test before.
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