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Bridgette Johnson |
SCHOOL: Alcorn State University
MAJOR: Psychology/Music Performance MENTOR: Dr. Kenneth McGraw EXPECTED GRADUATION DATE: May 2004 ORGANIZATIONS & HONORS:
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ABSTRACT
Gender Effect Size on a Mirror Drawing Task
| On average, males have better performance than females on a variety of spatial reasoning tasks. Meta-analyses show that the gender effect ranges from about .67 for mental rotation tasks to .12 for paper folding tasks. Using a computerized mirror drawing task that required participants to trace a 5-pointed star with reversed mouse movements, I obtained a gender effect estimate for mirror drawing. Performance was measured using average completion time for two trials. The data from 1463 females and 646 males showed males to be faster by 24 seconds for the full data set (d=.53) and faster by 22 seconds in a dataset from which outliers were removed (d=.66). These results indicate that speed of mirror drawing produces a gender difference nearly as large as mental rotation, which is typically taken to be the task on which males and females differ most. |