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Abstract:
Sex-dimorphic ability is found on a subset of spatial tasks,
these exhibiting a male advantage. Differences based on sexual
orientation have also been reported on the same tasks, but only in
men. However, these sex and sexual orientation effects may be
attributable to gender role, an individuals relative degree of
masculinity or femininity. For example, differences between
heterosexual men and women may be due to the fact that the women
sampled were more feminine than the men, implemented more
'feminine' cognitive strategies, and thus performed worse than the
men (Bryden, 1979). While studies have reported effects of gender
role and differential strategy use on cognitive performance in
unselected heterosexual men and women, to our knowledge no studies
have investigated gender role effects while holding sex and sexual
orientation constant. The current study accomplishes this goal by
including 26 self-identified lesbians whose scores on Freund's
Masculine Gender Identity Scale ranged from very feminine to very
masculine. Participants completed a battery of spatial tasks
including tests of spatial perception and mental rotation (MR). One
of the MR tasks used a selective interference paradigm (Pezaris
& Casey, 1991) to assess strategy use during MR. Strategy use
was further investigated by introspective report following testing.
Correlational analyses between measures of gender role and spatial
ability failed to reveal any significant effects. Further,
chi-squared analyses revealed no significant differences in
strategy use between masculine and feminine groups. These results
suggest that, in lesbians, levels of masculinity and femininity
have negligible effects on spatial ability and strategy use.
Further research is needed to explore whether such relationships
exist in men or in heterosexual women.
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