Sex Differences in Processing Movement vs Objects Figure 4. Data shown in the upper panel are the percentage of correct responses (mean ±SEM) for color discrimination in 19 males and 27 females under dual attention conditions in Experiment 3. *p,0.05 from males in same condition. Lower panel shows the mean target error (6SEM) for the same participants. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032238.g004 mental rotation [43–48]. Targeting tasks require rapid analysis of real or imagined movement, which is most efficiently accom- plished by a strong reliance on a bottom-up analysis associated with dorsal stream processing [52,53]. A female preference for top- down analysis in spatial processing can also explain why females generally show poorer performance in targeting tasks [6]. Targeting accuracy in both sexes was relatively constant across the ball speeds that we used, which ranged from slow to moderately fast. Intuitively, one might expect that females would do as well as males when the ball moved slowly because it allows them time to perform a thorough assessment of ball trajectory. Yet, the results from Experiment 1 showed a consistently large sex difference in the Allocentric conditions at all three speeds tested (4.0, 8.0 and 12.0 cm/sec), with a trend toward better accuracy at the fastest speed. The fact that females did not improve with slower ball speeds is consistent with the hypothesis that females are employing a top-down strategy and may even be processing static information in the target testing environment in addition to the dynamic movement demands of the task. A second finding that emerged from these studies is that ball speed influences the reaction time associated with the response regardless of whether the task involved a choice about movement or color recognition. Faster ball speeds led to faster reaction time in determining the intersection point of the moving ball or choosing the color shade. This relationship was observed whether the participant made a choice immediately after the event occurred or was forced to wait for an additional 2 seconds before responding. At first glance, the correlation between ball speed and reaction time appears to be consistent with the concept of embodied cognition, where simulation of ball movement is PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 7 March 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 3 | e32238