Why men are clever in spatial thinking than women?

Men are consistently superior to women in space tasks, including mental rotation, which is the ability to identify what a three-dimensional object will look like if rotated in space. A University of Iowa study shows the relationship between this ability, related to gender, and the structure of the parietal lobe, the area of the brain that controls this type of ability.

It has already been known that the parietal lobe is different in men and women, and in women the parietal lobes have proportionally thicker cortex, or “gray matter”. “But this difference has never been related to the actual differences in mental rotation test performance.

UI researchers found that the thicker bark in the parietal lobe in women is associated with a lower capacity for mental rotation, and in a new structural discovery that the surface area of the parietal lobe increases in men compared to women. Moreover, in men, a large area of the parietal lobe is directly related to better performance in performing mental rotation tasks.

The results of the study were published on Nov. Five in brain and perception magazine.

“Differences in the activation of the parietal lobe have been seen in other studies. This study represents the first time linked the specific structural differences in the parietal lobe associated with an exciting performance on the test mental rotation,” said Tim. Kush your, lead author of the study and a graduate student in the College of Graduate Studies at the University of Iowa nerves.

“”It is important to note that it is not that women can’t perform the functions of the contract development, but it seems they do it more slowly, and the men and women performing this task perfectly.”

The study was based on tests of 76 healthy Caucasian volunteers-38 women and 38 men, all right-handed except two men. The groups were compared by age, education, IQ and socio-economic education. When tested for mental rotation, men average 66 percent correct compared to 53 percent correct for women.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed an estimated 10 per cent difference between men and women in the total surface area of the parietal lobe: 43 square centimeters for men and 40 square centimeters for women.

“It is likely that a large surface area in the parietal lobes of men leads to an increase in the functional columns, which are the unit of treatment of the cerebral cortex,” Kotuku said. “It could mean specializing in certain spatial abilities in men.”

The results highlight the fact that not only is the brain structure different between men and women, but the way the brain performs the task is different, said peg Nopoulos, MD, co-author of the study and Professor of psychiatry and Pediatrics at Iowa Carver University Medical College.

“A possible explanation is that the differences in the structure of the brain allows for differences in strategies used by men and women. It’s important at all. While men seem to be able to rotate the goal around the light in space, women seem to like to piece by piece of it.

The strategy is this, but it takes what they can get,” said Nopoulos, who is also a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa hospital and clinics.

“There is no big question whether this is natural or a study. Ask my question: on the other hand, girls compared to boys, can be improved. If this skill, but we will eventually see that the children of two strong practical and structural differences parietal shares, it is a biological, just environmental impact, “ nopoulos added.