Journal
DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 42, Issue 6, Pages 1259-1268Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC/EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING FOUNDATION
DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.42.6.1259
Keywords
spatial development; gesture; strategies; mental rotation; sex differences
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Funding
- NICHD NIH HHS [T32 HD043729-01A1] Funding Source: Medline
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On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 41/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, whether they were given explicit instruction or just practice. Regardless of training condition, the more children gestured about moving the pieces when asked to explain how they solved the spatial transformation task, the better they performed on the task, with boys gesturing about movement significantly more (and performing better) than girls. Gesture thus provides useful information about children's spatial strategies, raising the possibility that gesture training may be particularly effective in improving children's mental rotation skills.
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