Gender-related differences in spatial ability and the k factor of general spatial ability in a population of academically talented students

Abstract

Spatial ability is an area of cognitive functioning in which evidence of gender-related differences in performance tends to emerge relatively often. Previous research has found, however, that different types of spatial tasks differ in their amounts of gender-sensitivity. Mental rotation tasks, for instance, have often shown large gender-related differences in favour of males, whereas there are small differences or advantages for females on visual memory tasks. Therefore, the present study examined the profile of differences across a wide array of types of spatial tasks. Two forms of a spatial test battery containing 14 types of items each were administered to academically talented middle and high school students. Factor analysis yielded a strong general factor (termed “k factor”) underlying performance in both forms. The gender-sensitivity of the item types depended to a considerable extent on the loadings of the subtests on the k factor. When the k factor was partialled out of the variances of the tests, gender-related differences on the various types of items were reduced, often to insignificance, and some tests that had initially exhibited little gender-related variance showed advantages for females. Mental rotation and visualization of perspectives, however, consistently showed substantial gender-related variance beyond the variation explained by the k factor.