Gender and Spatial Ability: Nora Newcombe
1. How did you become interested in psychology?
> You know, I don't actually utterly remember the origin of this. I became a psychology major, as a lot of people do, because I was interested in mental illness and clinical work and helping people. And I actually had some summer jobs and so forth working with chronic alcoholics and working at a halfway house and so forth. And I think I kind of simultaneously got disillusioned with the possibilities of therapy and just got intrigued by some of my coursework. So I was taking courses in developmental psychology. And originally it appealed, basically, to a kind of philosophical side of me which wanted to know about, kind of, these big questions, the origins of knowledge; and how do people get the way they get to be; and genetics and environment; and are people born innocent and become polluted; or are they born wild and have to become socialized. And the rest followed from there.
2. What is your current area of research?
> Broadly speaking, I work in cognitive development. More specifically, I'm interested in both memory development and also in spatial development. And within spatial development, I'm interested both in the kinds of changes that sort of all infants and children go through that are really universal and very typical, and also in the emergence of differences among children and, you know, what psychologists call "individual differences," including differences between males and females, between boys and girls, between men and women.
3. Describe individual differences in spatial abilities, and provide a real-world example of mental rotation.
> The differences in spatial ability are seen not in everything that you might construe to be spatial. They're actually confined to a couple of areas, but those are areas that are potentially quite important. And the one area that is sort of most famously discussed is something called "mental rotation," which you can -- imagine if you think of any kind of three-dimensional -- what's really used to test it is block structures, but you can imagine a piece of furniture as a more homely example, that you have to think about turning it this way, turning it that way; and how is it going to look from these different vantage points; how is it going to fit in something. So the reason I mention a piece of furniture is something that students are commonly faced with because they move often so that they need to perhaps pick up a couch that they're getting secondhand from Aunt Rita, and fit it into their car. And the question is, can it go in, and if so, how do you twist it to get it in? And that's a real-world example of mental rotation, and boys and men are better at it.
4. Are there more similarities than differences between males and females in spatial abilities?
> The dist -- the distributions are overlapping, which is a technical way of saying that if you take, you know, one boy at random and one girl at random, you know, there's a decent chance that the girl's going to be better than the boy; so it's not that every boy is better than every girl. But at the same time, if you were a betting person, and you just had to, okay, here's a boy, here's a girl, we're going to test them. Which are you going to bet on? You'd bet on the boy because, you know, on the average over many pairs of random, you know, this boy/that girl, you'd win more often than you'd lose by betting on the boy. So there's similarities, but there also are important differences.
5. What are some common misconceptions about sex differences in spatial abilities?
> Broadly speaking, you know, the controversy is between biological causes and some sort of environmental cause. But I think the most common misconception is that if the cause is biological, that that means that there's nothing we can do about it because biology is really not destiny. There's many biological conditions that people are born with that we can do a lot about. So one example is that if children are born unable to digest a particular protein called phenylalanine, then you become retarded if you eat a normal diet, but if you eat a diet that is, you know, doesn't contain that protein, you do not become retarded. So even though phenylketonuria is a true biological condition, there's lots we can do about it by manipulating the environment and getting rid of that particular, for them, what is particularly a toxin. So I think there's a lot we can do about sex differences even if they're biological.
6. Do you believe that sex differences in spatial abilities are innate or learned?
> Well, but I'm sort of saying that it can be both. I mean, that it could be an innate difference, and it may not be -- I'm not saying for sure that it is -- but that it could be an innate difference, and you could still have learning situations such that it did not appear.
7. What research findings are most surprising to you?
> Well, the most recent finding that I'm really quite excited about is a finding that concerns women who are low in spatial ability -- which not all women are. Some women are high in ability. But in terms of training and overcoming this sex difference, a key issue is how to get women who are low in ability, and who would benefit from training to, you know, improve. And if you take these women and bring them in weekly, initially, they don't get better very quickly. Later -- and we had them come in for a whole semester, and it takes until five or six weeks into the semester before they really begin to improve at a great rate. So when you think about what these means in the real world, there are these, you know, largely women, although some men, who are wandering around; they're not very good at, you know, thinking, “Can I get Aunt Rita's couch into my car?” And they think, “I'm bad at it.” And you say, "Oh. Just try," you know, "Let's work on it." And they do work on it for a while, and they don't get any better, so what they think to themselves is, “Well, it's hopeless.” Now we paid them to keep coming over the semester. But the big message is that -- whether we paid them or not -- that you should keep working because eventually you'll hit that sweet spot for learning, and you will get better. You have just a hump to get over before you get to the sweet spot.
8. Can playing video games help improve spatial abilities?
> One example is actually playing the game Tetras, which is a fairly popular game. And, in fact, people who start it and get into it, report being obsessed by it and being unable to stop and even dreaming about it. So we're not necessarily talking about anything, you know, really horrible and, you know, boring and that you wouldn't want to do. And, in fact, there are other video games that probably train other aspects of spatial ability. One that our research hasn't looked at but that other people's research has looked at is first-person shooter games, which men like better than women because they like to shoot; but what it improves other than, you know, possibly fostering aggression, is it actually improves your useful field of view, so because you're very concerned people are sort of coming at you from the side to shoot you, you expand your useful field of view. And it's just really interesting to me that you can change something that seems as basic and fixed as that.
9. Do other experiences contribute to sex differences in spatial abilities?
> One thing that people have discussed, because these are timed tests, is that one thing that men may be better at is just sort of saying, "Okay, fine. I know it's a rush, but, you know, I think it's that, and I'm willing to sort of guess even though, you know, I'm only about 80 percent sure, but I think this is the correct answer. Let's go on to the next one." And that -- by means of that, you get a better score because of the fact that it's a timed test. So the women might be 100 percent correct because they take the time to work through it, but they only do a smaller proportion of the items. There's really mixed evidence on that, though, and it's not clear that that's the case. Another story that people will tell is that this is possibly something that's sex typed. So you come and you think, you know, this is something that men are going to be better at, and that basically becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that women don't do as well because they think they're not going to. Again, there's kind of mixed evidence on that, but there could be some truth to that.
10. Are there any instances in which women show superior spatial skills?
> Most cultures in which we've looked at the sex difference in mental rotation, do show it. There's a couple of exceptions, and one of them are the Inuit, the people -- the native peoples of northern North America. That's -- it's hard to know how to interpret that. It could be evidence of the fact that they've needed to navigate in a very, very kind of homogeneous environment because it's kind of all snow, and as a function of that they've developed some spatial ability that, you know, women in our culture don't tend to develop. It's also possible, though, that it speaks to a genetic issue because maybe women, you know, people who couldn't navigate in that kind of all-white environment were, you know, didn't find their way to the igloo in time, and froze, basically, [Laughter] is what I'm trying to say diplomatically. So it could be either genetic or an environmental effect. But that's the one group where we don't find the sex difference.
11. How do mental rotation and other spatial abilities apply to everyday life and work?
> One of the reasons why people are especially interested in this is because mental rotation and other kinds of spatial ability probably are important in learning science and math and engineering, becoming an architect. Surgeons who do laparoscopic surgery have to imagine what kind of view they're looking at through a tiny film camera that's been inserted into someone's abdomen. And those kinds of things are skills that people kind of care about a lot.
12. Have you found any common traits among women who demonstrate above-average spatial abilities?
> There is some evidence that women who have higher spatial ability might have a more instrumental, which often is thought to be a more masculine, personality. But when I say more masculine, I don't mean that they like to stomp around and crush beer cans on their forehead. [Chuckle] I kind of mean that they care very much about getting something straight, and they're willing to sort of press people to be very clear. Those kinds of things are often thought of to be masculine traits, but actually they're just adaptive, coping-with-the-world kind of traits, as opposed to just kind of being deferential, which sometimes is thought to be more feminine, but I hate to even say that but... So there's some evidence like that.
13. Where do you see your research heading in the future?
> Well, I think, by far, the most important question is to really define much more precisely how it is that we can help people to improve. And not only to improve in the immediate short run, but to get gains that are durable, that are going to last over time. To get gains that are also going to generalize, so you're not just better at something that's really highly specific, but it'll mean that you're also, say, not only better at mental rotation, but also better at doing origami, you know, that sort of folding a little piece of paper to look like a swan; which is different from mental rotation. You have to just imagine what the folds in the paper are going to look like. So it's still a spatial transformation, but it's a slightly different one. So to get generalization. And I think we don't know how long it's going to take, what kinds of input are going to be the best. There's some indication that gesture may be actually very important in helping people to build these skills. So I really am eager to find how to help people improve.