Scholars have known for some time that males outperform females by adolescence. It is also an important piece of work because of the methodology. Their work is the first strong evidence we have about how early differences in spatial learning develop between boys and girls and should lead to additional important work in the area of early learning. Other studies suggest that the gap between boys and girls in spatial skill may widen as they grow older, possibly due to greater spatial input to males. The tasks often require the ability to mentally rotate images, she added.
Mental rotation is a specific example of spatial transformation.
Spatial transformation is the general change in an individual's view of the relationship between him or herself and an object or array of objects. Mental rotation is a particular process through which a viewer predicts what any array of objects would look like if they were rotated on its axis by some number of degrees. The University of Chicago researchers used tests of mental transformation as they studied 288 children for their research. The scholars studied mental because it is the spatial skill that other studies have shown to be the strongest determinant of differences in spatial skill between males and females. The children were presented with pictures of two pieces of a complex geometric shape.