Courtney Pierce |
SCHOOL: University of Mississippi
MAJOR: Psychology MENTOR: Dr. Kenneth McGraw EXPECTED GRADUATION DATE: May 2005 ORGANIZATIONS & HONORS:
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ABSTRACT
Gender Effect Size on a Maze Learning 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 maze learning task that required participants to find their way through a 16-chamber maze, I obtained a gender effect estimate for maze learning, a task that is not well represented in the spatial ability literature. Performance was measured using average completion time for 15 trials. The data from 495 females and 259 males showed males to be faster by 1.82 seconds for the full data set (d=.23) and faster by 2 seconds in a dataset from which outliers were removed (d=.50). Assuming that the second estimate is the better estimate of the true gender difference, these results indicate that speed of maze learning 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. |