SEX DIFFERENCES IN HEMISPHERIC LATERALIZATION FOR THE PERCEPTION OF DIRECTIONALITY: THE ROLE OF VERBAL ANALYSIS.
Item
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Title
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SEX DIFFERENCES IN HEMISPHERIC LATERALIZATION FOR THE PERCEPTION OF DIRECTIONALITY: THE ROLE OF VERBAL ANALYSIS.
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Identifier
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AAI8023745
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identifier
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8023745
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Creator
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CLAYTON, JOAN KAY.
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Contributor
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Joseph Glick | Geoffrey B. Saxe
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Date
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1980
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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A frequent finding in the area of cognitive development is the generally higher performance levels on spatial tasks in males than in females. One explanation for this performance discrepancy involves the possibility of greater hemispheric lateralization and specialization for spatial functions in males. It has also been suggested that the existence of less lateralization in females and/or a possible earlier maturational lead in language development may account for a "preference" in females to process all information--both verbal and spatial--in a verbal/linguistic form. Since spatial manipulations and transformations are relatively difficult to translate into linguistic structures, females face a loss in information processing efficiency when solving spatial tasks.;One corollary to the notion of greater lateralization in males is the possibility that the neural substrate underlying this specialization leads to a greater susceptibility for disruption or interference in hemispheric functions.;The current study examined the position that verbal mediation is the preferred cognitive strategy for females, and that males may demonstrate an interference effect when using a cognitive strategy "nonnative" to a given hemisphere, or when using two different strategies simultaneously at the level of single hemisphere processing.;Subjects consisted of fifth and ninth grade boys and girls. Half of the subjects were provided with a verbal strategy to describe lines of different orientations (e.g., 0(DEGREES), 30(DEGREES), 90(DEGREES), 135(DEGREES), etc.) by reference to the four directions of slant ("L" - left, "R" - right, "A" - across, "S" - straight). Lines were placed in two by two matrices and presented tachistoscopically to each lateral field. Subjects had to reproduce the direction of each line on answer sheets. Comparison of trained and untrained subjects indicated that with training, girls performed better than boys; and the left hemisphere of boys made fewer correct drawings with than without training, suggesting the possibility of the incompatibility of verbal and spatial strategies in the left hemisphere. For girls, however, the left hemisphere performed significantly better with than without training, suggesting that girls can and prefer to use verbal mediation for processing line directionality. These findings were repeated in a second experiment in which trained subjects were asked to compare letters and lines presented simultaneously to a single field (e.g., if the letter was "L" (left), the line should be to the left (FDIAG)). Overall, girls made significantly more correct comparison judgments than boys; girls demonstrated a left hemisphere bias; boys demonstrated a right hemisphere bias. Finally, the data indicated significantly better performance by ninth than by fifth graders on all tasks with some indication of greater laterality differences in the ninth than fifth graders.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Educational Psychology
