{"id":736,"date":"2011-06-12T20:03:29","date_gmt":"2011-06-12T20:03:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/?p=736"},"modified":"2011-06-12T20:05:56","modified_gmt":"2011-06-12T20:05:56","slug":"women-are-crap-at-mental-rotation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/?p=736","title":{"rendered":"Women are crap at mental rotation"},"content":{"rendered":"

In psychology, there’s a classic study of mental rotation. In this, you get\r\nan example shape and some other shapes, and you have to work out which are the\r\nsame as the example. The first rotation study was done by Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler back\r\nin 1971. The technique is used to show various things<\/a> – it appears that the time\r\nwe take to match a shape is proportional to the angle we’d have to rotate it\r\nthrough. Which suggests that we are, indeed, rotating the image in our head.\r\nSo, we may well have images in our heads (rather than “features”, or other more\r\nabstract representations). This might seem obvious to you, but for those of us\r\nwho work in vision, determining the way in which our brains choose to represent\r\nthe visual world is actually a very interesting and far from settled research\r\nquestion. So mental rotation is important, and one of the most repeated\r\nexperiments in psychology.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In some of the many many variants of mental rotation study that have been\r\nrun since Shepard’s original, researchers have found startlingly consistent\r\ngender differences. Women are a bit slower than men. This has been held up as\r\nan example (or even proof) of women’s poorer visual-spatial ability, and used\r\nto explain our “difficulty” with mathematical, scientific, visual disciplines.\r\nIt’s even been linked to our lamentable inability to park a car. But I’m\r\nreading a book that describes more recent research into stereotype\r\nthreat<\/i> showing we can reverse this effect in certain situations. It’s making me think again about the whole women in\r\nscience question.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

If you cast the mental rotation task as a test of cognitive or perceptual\r\nability (as researchers normally do), men do better. If you describe it as\r\ncorrelated with visual, spatial, or engineering ability, men do better again.\r\nBut if you say that good performance on mental rotation tests is correlated\r\nwith ability in interior design, flower arranging and needlework, men’s\r\nadvantage starts to slip. Remember, we’re talking about exactly the same\r\ntest<\/i> here, just with a different preamble. Apparently, in another\r\nexperiment, an Italian researcher [1] repeated the mental rotation stuff with\r\nthe following preamble: “Apparently, women perform better than men in this\r\ntest, probably for genetic reasons<\/i>” and the opposite statement. You guessed\r\nit – the women did better when they were told they were expected to, and the\r\nmen did better when they were told men<\/i> were expected to perform\r\nbetter.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The problem here is that the general expectation – the stereotype – is that\r\nwomen are worse at some tasks and men are worse at others. The effect can be\r\nexacerbated, exaggerated, and emphasised by circumstances (women don’t do as\r\nwell at tests if they’re in an obvious minority, for example). This is what is\r\nmeant by stereotype threat<\/i>: the threat of conforming to your stereotype\r\ncauses all sorts of additional cognitive load, which ironically makes\r\nyou more likely to conform to your stereotype. People have even done\r\nexperiments where they’ve showed participants TV ads featuring dizzy women (or\r\nneutral ads) before tests, and shown that simply watching a TV ad with an\r\nairhead in it can make women perform less well in a test environment<\/i> [2].\r\nThis has such far-reaching implications for stuff like testing, teaching, role\r\nmodels, and… pretty much all of STEM education and policy. It’s going to\r\ntake me a while to mentally digest it all.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The book that’s introduced me to all this is Delusions of\r\nGender<\/a>, and it’s turning out to be a great buy. I’m only on chapter five,\r\nbut it’s an eminently readable overview of current gender research and I’m\r\nfinding it frightening and enlightening. I’d seriously recommend it to anyone\r\ninterested in gender issues – particularly those of use who are working in\r\ncomputing and other disciplines where there’s a serious gender gap. It’s\r\nsurprising to think how much this stuff might be affecting us, even when we’re\r\nas open and as serious as we can be about trying to negate the effects of\r\ngender on our performance and experiences. And that goes for the blokes,\r\ntoo.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

[1] Moè, A. (2009). Are males always better than females at mental rotation? Learning and individual differences<\/i> 19(1) 21-27 http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1016\/j.lindif.2008.02.002<\/a><\/small><\/p>\r\n

[2] Davies, P. G., Spencer, S. J., & Steele, C. M. (2002). Consuming images: How television commercials that elicit stereotype threat can restrain women academically and professionally. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,<\/i> 28(12), 1615-1628 http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1177\/014616702237644<\/a><\/small><\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In psychology, there’s a classic study of mental rotation. In this, you get an example shape and some other shapes, and you have to work out which are the same as the example. The first rotation study was done by Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler back in 1971. The technique is used to show various things – it appears that the time we take to match a shape is proportional to the angle we’d have to rotate it through. Which suggests that we are, indeed, rotating the image in our head. So, we may well have images in our heads (rather than “features”, or otherRead More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-admin","post-736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-wic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=736"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}