title: Spatial Ability Explains the Male Advantage in Approximate Arithmetic.
abstract: Previous research has shown that females consistently outperform males in exact arithmetic, perhaps due to the former's advantage in language processing. Much less is known about gender difference in approximate arithmetic. Given that approximate arithmetic is closely associated with visuospatial processing, which shows a male advantage we hypothesized that males would perform better than females in approximate arithmetic. In two experiments (496 children in Experiment 1 and 554 college students in Experiment 2), we found that males showed better performance in approximate arithmetic, which was accounted for by gender differences in spatial ability.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang UniversityHangzhou, China; State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Siegler Center for Innovative Learning, Beijing Normal UniversityBeijing, China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine CA, USA.
authors.forename: Chuansheng
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Siegler Center for Innovative Learning, Beijing Normal University Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Xinlin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhou
keywords: approximate arithmetic; gender difference; spatial ability