Influence of Gender-Neutral Stimuli on Sex Differences in Mental Rotation

Due to their high relevance for everyday tasks as well as their significance for the gender gap in STEM fields, gender differences in spatial imagination represent a much-studied object at the interface of developmental and cognitive psychological research. Among many other factors of the psychobiosocial causal structure, typical male characteristics of the cube ligers used in most mental rotation tests according to Shepard & Metzler (1971) also favour a performance advantage of male subjects. However, since not only the stereotyped nature but also the associative proximity of abstract stimuli to geometric shapes and the field of mathematics can be an influencing factor of the stimulus material, the aim of this project is to develop gender-neutral stimuli in abstract and concrete form and to investigate their influence on the gender difference in comparison with already existing typically male and typically female stimuli. By means of differently stereotyped stimuli and their neutral counterparts as well as the different degree of abstractness, it is possible to systematically work out what influence the respective characteristics have and what influence they have on the efficiency of the solution strategies and the stress perception when solving the tasks.