In addition to age, task characteristics influence the gender effect in mental rotation, with the “Mental Rotations Test” (MRT, Vandenberg and Kuse, 1978, Peters et al., 1995) inducing the largest male advantage. Johnson and Meade, 1987, Neuburger et al., 2011). Mental-rotation tests, which assess the ability to rotate two- and three-dimensional objects in the mind (Shepard & Metzler, 1971), induce one of the largest cognitive gender differences (Halpern, 2012), which emerge already before adolescence (e.g. Furthermore, the influence of rotational axis on boys' and girls' mental-rotation performance was investigated, because previous studies indicate a larger male advantage for in-depth rotations than for picture-plane rotations (Voyer et al., 1995). The present study examined the situational influence of implicitly activated gender stereotypes on mental-rotation performance, a domain for which large gender differences in favor of male participants are usually found in adults (Lippa et al., 2010, Voyer, 2011, Voyer et al., 1995). The detrimental effect of negative stereotypes is called Stereotype Threat (Steele, 1997, Steele and Aronson, 1995), the beneficial effect of positive stereotypes is called Stereotype Lift (Walton & Cohen, 2003). They influence achievement not only by inducing long-term effects on self-concept and skill development (Appel and Kronberger, 2012, Bussey and Bandura, 1999), but also by interrupting – or, in the case of positive in-group stereotypes, promoting – cognitive, perceptual and motor performance in the test situation (Aronson & McGlone, 2009). Stereotypes are “expectations or beliefs about characteristics associated with different groups” (Swim & Hyers, 2009, p.
Findings suggest that a task framing relating mental rotation to arts induces a stereotype-lift effect and that the rotational axis moderates the effect of implicit gender-stereotype activation. However, in-depth rotation tasks induced a significant male advantage in both the threatening and the non-threatening conditions. Boys outperformed girls in the threatening condition, but not in the non-threatening condition, here. Implicit gender stereotype activation influenced the gender difference only in picture-plane mental-rotation tasks. Both genders showed a male stereotype for mental rotation. Children's gender stereotypes were assessed by a questionnaire. non-threatening task framing) and rotational axis (picture-plane vs. This study examined the performance of 272 fourth-grade boys and girls in a psychometric mental-rotation task varying implicit gender-stereotype activation (threatening vs. The influence of task features and stereotype activation on the mental-rotation performance of elementary-school children has rarely been investigated. Mental-rotation tasks usually induce large gender differences in favor of males.