Raevan Hanan¹, Brandon Eich², Tom Tomshe³, Chloe Kindell⁴, Hanane Ramzaoui⁵, Heather Lucas⁶, Melissa Beck⁷; ¹Louisiana State University

Mental rotation is a valuable skill for individuals in many STEM-related fields. Further, females are underrepresented in many STEM disciplines. Sex differences in mental rotation abilities may be a contributing factor, as evidence suggests that males outperform females on mental rotation tasks. In this study, we directly compared sex differences in mental rotation to differences in performance between STEM and non-STEM majors. Undergraduate participants (N=91) judged if two block stimuli presented side-by-side were either the "same" (non-mirrored objects) or "different" (mirrored objects). The angle of disparity (AoD), between the two objects ranged from 0-160°. For sex differences, we observed a main effect of sex for accuracy, such that male participants had higher accuracy than female participants. This main effect of sex was not observed in response times (RT), suggesting that when female participants accurately rotate the objects, they are doing so as quickly as their male counterparts. However, there was a three-way interaction between AoD, trial type (same/different), and sex for RT. The difference between same and different trials is smaller overall for the harder trials (AoD 120°, 140°, & 160°) and this decrease in the effect at larger AoDs is more pronounced for females. For STEM versus Non-STEM majors, there was no main effect of major for accuracy or RT. However, there was an interaction between trial type and major. Specifically, accuracy on same trials was consistently higher than accuracy on different trials for non-stem majors, but this difference was less consistent for STEM majors. STEM majors may use a different strategy than non-STEM majors on some trials that is not biased toward better responses on same trials. These results suggest that differences in mental rotation associated with sex impact performance in a different way than differences associated with STEM experience.

Acknowledgements: This work was funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AM230273 for an ongoing investigation titled Enhancing STEM Success: A Multi-modal Investigating of Spatial Reasoning and Training in Undergraduate Education. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the NSF.