Sex differences in verbal and visual-spatial tasks under different hemispheric visual-field presentation conditions

Abstract

This paper reports sex differences in cognitive task performance that emerged when 39 Australian university undergraduates (19 men; 20 women) were asked to solve verbal (lexical) and visual-spatial cognitive matching tasks which varied in difficulty and visual field of presentation. Sex significantly interacted with task type, task difficulty, laterality, and changes in performance across trials. The results revealed that the significant individual-differences' variable of sex does not always emerge as a significant main effect, but instead in terms of significant interactions with other variables manipulated experimentally. Our results show that sex differences must be taken into account when conducting experiments into human cognitive-task performance.