Gender differences in pre-adolescents’ mental-rotation performance: Do they depend on grade and stimulus type?

In psychometric mental-rotation tasks, adult male participants usually outperform females. A large body of evidence suggests that this effect is reliable, quite stable over lifespan and one of the largest cognitive gender differences. However, there are controversial findings regarding the age in which the male advantage emerges. The present study aimed at contributing to a systematic developmental research of mental rotation by examining two grades and three stimulus types in order to determine how these variables influence the gender difference. Second and fourth graders (n = 432) were tested with a paper–pencil mental-rotation task in three stimulus conditions (animal pictures, letters, cube figures). Whereas fourth graders showed a small, but significant, stimulus-independent gender difference favoring males, there was no effect of gender on the mental-rotation performance of second graders. Fourth-grade boys performed better than second-grade boys in all stimulus conditions. Fourth-grade girls, in contrast, outperformed second-grade girls in the animal pictures condition and the letters condition, but not in the cube-figures condition. Results are discussed with regard to implications for causal mechanisms underlying the gender difference in mental rotation.