title: Age and gender differences in spatial perspective taking.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  It is often necessary in daily experience to change one's point of view to adopt mentally the spatial perspective of other persons, learn the position of different objects in a new environment or even describe an environment to other persons. Hence, the ability to link spatial information from different perspectives seems to be necessary to orient ourselves in the space. Several studies have found gender-related differences in spatial reasoning in younger adults, but little is known about such effects in middle-aged and older adults.
  
  
  METHODS
  This research was designed to study how spatial perspective taking is affected by gender and age along the lifespan. The Perspective Taking/Spatial Orientation Test (PPT; Kozhevnikov and Hegarty [1]) was administered to groups of younger, middle-aged, and older adults, with females and males represented in each age group.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The performance in the PPT decreased across age groups. All age groups had more errors in items that involved perspective changes of greater than 90º. Males performed better than females on most of the variables; however, no significant differences appeared in the interaction gender × age.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The present findings showed the relevance of the degree perspective change in visuo-spatial abilities, especially in the older group. In relation with the gender, males outperformed females; however, the interaction gender × age did not show significant differences.
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Neurociencias, Departamento de Psicología, Universidad de Oviedo, Plaza Feijoo s/n, 33003, Oviedo, Spain. zancadaclara@uniovi.es.|Instituto de Neurociencias Principado de Asturias (INEUROPA), Oviedo, Spain. zancadaclara@uniovi.es.
authors.forename: Clara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zancada-Menendez
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Neurociencias, Departamento de Psicología, Universidad de Oviedo, Plaza Feijoo s/n, 33003, Oviedo, Spain.|Instituto de Neurociencias Principado de Asturias (INEUROPA), Oviedo, Spain.
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sampedro-Piquero
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Neurociencias, Departamento de Psicología, Universidad de Oviedo, Plaza Feijoo s/n, 33003, Oviedo, Spain.|Instituto de Neurociencias Principado de Asturias (INEUROPA), Oviedo, Spain.
authors.forename: Laudino
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lopez
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 111 21st Ave South, Nashville, TN, 37203, USA.
authors.forename: Timothy P
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: McNamara
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D015577:Geriatric Assessment / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012737:Sex Factors; D013028:Space Perception; D013037:Spatial Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D065853:Spatial Learning; D065852:Spatial Memory; D013223:Statistics as Topic
keywords: Age; Gender; Perspective taking; Spatial orientation