The disparity in spatial-thinking skills between males and females is the largest known cognitive gender difference. A study led by psychologists at the University of Chicago found that five-year-old boys were already better than girls the same age at solving spatial-thinking problems that involved mentally fitting shapes together to make a whole. Upon closer analysis, however, this disparity was revealed to be not a gender difference so much as a difference in the propensity to gesture: the more children gestured while executing the task, the better their performance—and boys tended to
...more
