Body analogy and sex differences in mental rotation

Abstract

Body analogy is an operation that links spatial cognition with the sensorimotor systems. Previous studies on mental rotation have shown that adding a head at the top of stimulus cubes or imitating human posture improves mental rotation performance results. On the other hand, mental rotation performance tends to be better in males than females. In this study, we tested sex differences in the effects of body analogy on a mental rotation task. The task was to judge whether the stimulus from a pair of cubes was the same or not; we added faces to the cubes or imitated human posture with cubes. The results revealed that body analogy was useful for both males and females but the effect was greater for females. However, additional correlation analyses indicated that this effect was at least partly due to the differences in abilities required for mental rotation, rather than sex differences. These results suggest that body analogy can compensate for weaknesses in spatial cognition.