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Literature on mental rotation tasks consistently reports that males perform better than females. The current study is an attempt to scrutinize the influence of culture and experience with spatial activities in performance on a mental rotation test. The participants were 115 Ecuadorians, 120 Irish Caucasians and 128 Japanese. Half the participants in each group were male and half were female. They completed the Group Mental Rotation Test (GMRT) and a Spatial Activities Questionnaire (SAQ). Males outperformed females on the GMRT in all three cultures. Participation in “masculine activities” from the SAQ correlated with high GMRT scores, in “feminine activities” with low GMRT scores. There was a main effect of nationality; subjects from Ireland and Japan scored higher than their counterparts in Ecuador. The implications of the nationality effect raises questions about the widely accepted stability of the gender difference in spatial ability.

Literature on mental rotation tasks consistently reports that males perform better than females. The current study is an attempt to scrutinize the influence of culture and experience with spatial activities in performance on a mental rotation test. The participants were 115 Ecuadorians, 120 Irish Caucasians and 128 Japanese. Half the participants in each group were male and half were female. They completed the Group Mental Rotation Test (GMRT) and a Spatial Activities Questionnaire (SAQ). Males outperformed females on the GMRT in all three cultures. Participation in “masculine activities” from the SAQ correlated with high GMRT scores, in “feminine activities” with low GMRT scores. There was a main effect of nationality; subjects from Ireland and Japan scored higher than their counterparts in Ecuador. The implications of the nationality effect raises questions about the widely accepted stability of the gender difference in spatial ability.

Long-term use of a sign language may enhance visual abilities. Deaf signers consistently outscore their hearing nonsigning counterparts on visual memory tests. In a similar vein, the long-term use of a logographic script, Chinese characters appears to boost visual memory. Both learning a sign language and mastering Chinese characters involve a relatively complex task of visual recognition and memory. This review of the literature suggests that daily use of either a sign language, one not based on sound, or Chinese characters, a script which maps language at the word level rather than at the phonemic level, may facilitate recall of visual forms.

We investigated the effect of familiarity on people’s perception of facial likeness by asking participants to choose which of two mirror-symmetric chimeric images (made from the left or right half of a photograph of a face) looked more like an original image. In separate trials the participants made this judgment for their own face and for the face of a close friend; half of them matched to a true image of the original and half matched to a mirror image of the original. In the case of matching to a friend’s face presented in the familiar orientation, over 80% of participants chose the left–left composite to be a better likeness to the original, whereas only 62% showed the same left-side bias when matching to a mirror image. The difference is significant, and the result contrasts markedly with a second experiment where participants who were unfamiliar with the faces showed comparable left-side biases when matching to true or mirror reversed images. The result suggests that perceptual asymmetries are retained in our long-term memory for highly familiar faces. While matching to images of self also showed an effect of familiarity, the data in this condition show less evidence of perceptual asymmetry and are discussed in relation to recent research on the representation of one’s own face.

We investigated hemispheric asymmetries in face processing using a task in which participants judged the likeness of chimeric faces to their own face and to the face of a close friend based on their memory for those faces. When asked to choose which of two mirror-symmetric images (one made from the left half and one from the right half of a photograph of their face) looked more like themselves as remembered, participants showed a significant bias for the composite corresponding to the half face that lies in their right visual field when they look at themselves in the mirror. They showed the opposite bias when asked to make the same choice for images of a close friend, that is, they showed a significant bias for the composite corresponding to the half face that lies in their left visual field when they look at their friend. This result shows that in the case of these highly familiar faces—self and friend—the perceptual asymmetry is preserved in the memory representation. Assuming that people remember their own face as a mirror-image, the data also suggest a dissociation in face processing such that the left brain is dominant for the recognition of self and the right brain is dominant for the recognition of others.

Reproduced with permission of publisher from: Flaherty, M. Influence of yoga on body image satisfaction in men. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2014, 119, 1, 203-214. © Perceptual and Motor Skills 2014. Available here

Flaherty, M. (2015). What We Can Learn from Hearing Parents of Deaf Children in Australasian Journal of Special Education, 39(1), 67-84. Available here.