Spatial cognition
Does exercise help explain why men score higher on spatial tests?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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