A German team from the Ruhr-Univeristät in Bochum says women’s spatial abilities vary as their hormone levels rise and fall.
Women’s scores on spatial reasoning tests vary according to the stage of their menstrual cycle. The scores are lower during the early stage of the cycle, when oestrogen levels are higher, and they peak during menstruation, when testosterone levels increase. “Scores on mental rotation tasks are very strongly influenced by sex hormones and by the sex of the participant,” says Markus Hausmann.
How testosterone exerts its effect is not clear, says Hausmann, but the findings fit in with other research on sex hormones and spatial reasoning, says Daryl O’Connor at Leeds University. “This is interesting work, but it isn’t a surprise,” he says. Previous research has found that at higher than normal physiological levels, testosterone increased men’s verbal dexterity but O’Connor thinks the excess testosterone is converted to oestradiol, which inhibits spatial reasoning.
This does explain why women are more accurate at exactly the time they are often most dangerous (as many a black eyed bloke will testify) and why having a tantrum will just make things worse if you’re a lad.
“These differences are really academic – they’re slight. But we need to tease out the effect of the hormones on reasoning,” he told the New Scientist.