Does exercise help explain why men score higher on spatial tests?
Young men beat young women on most spatial tests and also exercised more, and statistically, differences in exercise, especially vigorous exercise, accounted for part of the spatial gap.
Source
Exercise mediates the sex differences in adult visuospatial cognitive ability
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session testing: self-reported leisure exercise questionnaire plus a tablet-based visuospatial battery, analysed with bootstrapped simple and parallel mediation models controlling for spatial anxiety, sense of direction and childhood spatial activities
- N
- N=224 · 224 analysed (112 women, 112 men) after 12 of 236 recruited participants were excluded
- Population
- Healthy right-handed university students aged 18-25 from universities in Hangzhou, China
- Outcome
- Mental rotation accuracy, forward and backward spatial span, maze completion time, and 3D driving (map memory) errors and thinking time
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What they did
The researchers tested 224 university students (half women, half men) on a tablet battery covering mental rotation at two difficulty levels, forward and backward spatial sequence memory, maze navigation and a 3D map-memory driving task. Participants reported how often they did strenuous, moderate and mild exercise in a typical week and completed questionnaires on spatial anxiety, sense of direction and childhood spatial activities, which were used as covariates. Bootstrapped mediation models tested whether exercise frequency carried part of the link between sex and spatial performance.
What they found
Men outperformed women on mental rotation, spatial span, maze speed and several 3D driving measures, with small-to-moderate effect sizes that were largest for hard mental rotation and spatial span; clicking speed did not differ. Men also reported much more exercise, especially strenuous exercise. The overall exercise score partially mediated the sex gap on hard mental rotation, both spatial spans and 3D driving errors, accounting for roughly a fifth to a third of the effect, but only about a tenth for easy mental rotation. When exercise intensities were entered together, strenuous exercise was the main mediator; the direct effect of sex remained significant in every model.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The data are cross-sectional, so 'mediation' here is a statistical pattern, not evidence that exercise causes better spatial skill; people with good spatial skills may simply choose more sports, as the authors acknowledge. Exercise was self-reported frequency only, with no duration or objective measurement, and important confounds such as general cognitive ability, socioeconomic status, sleep and personality were not measured. The sample was homogeneous university students, and the paper's wording sometimes blurs results for the overall exercise score with those for strenuous exercise alone, so readers should check which model a percentage comes from. Whether encouraging women to exercise would shrink the gap needs intervention studies.
Key terms
- Mental rotation
- Imagining an object turning in order to judge whether two views show the same shape.
- Corsi-type spatial span
- Remembering and reproducing a sequence of highlighted locations, forward or in reverse order.
- Mediation analysis
- A statistical test of whether part of the association between two variables runs through a third variable.
- Partial mediation
- When a mediator accounts for some, but not all, of an effect, so a direct effect remains.
- Bootstrapping
- Repeatedly resampling the data to estimate a confidence interval, used here to test whether indirect effects differ from zero.
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Quiz yourself
What kind of evidence does this study provide about exercise and spatial skill?
Common questions
Does this prove exercise improves spatial ability?
No. All measures were taken once, so the direction of the link is unknown, and unmeasured factors could drive both exercise and spatial skill; a randomized exercise trial would be needed.
Why were the tests untimed?
To reduce the chance that sex differences simply reflected processing speed rather than spatial ability itself.
Why might exercise matter more for harder tasks?
The authors suggest exercise benefits may show most when tasks tax cognitive resources, but this is an interpretation of correlational data.
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