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Comment by nickpeterson | Hacker News Reader

I’d be really curious to collect gender before testing, because I feel like this is always one of those go to examples of the difference and male and female brains, would be curious to know if there is any substantial actual difference.

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Difficult to control for the effects of "building toys" such as Lego being primarily marketed at boys. These types of toys help train this kind of spacial awareness from an early age.

See also early computers being marketed almost exclusively at men and boys, potentially being the cause of a major drop off of women in computer sciences in the 1980s: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

Not really.

Babies show sex differences in spatial skills.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081209100948.h...

…and once they grow up?

Reading that study, I’m not convinced, it’s 20 boys and girls, and the method doesn’t appear foolproof to me. To be clear, I don’t really have an issue accepting there may be some difference, but I feel like it’s extremely overstated.

I read in a psychology book that this is one of the (few) cases where there’s a big gender difference in intelligence: males statistically do a lot better at this than females, and I believe those with higher testosterone also statistically do better.

I remember this fact being cited a lot as well, but honestly I question it, as others said, boys toys have traditionally been much more building / schematic oriented. I honestly doubt there would be a huge discrepancy in kids today

From playing around with it, it's pretty obvious this is an extremely trainable task. I was able to double my performance within a few seconds, and I got a really strong feeling that I could become even better with training. I don't think it would be an obvious way of telling apart female and male brains because of all the differential relevant training.

Piaget's water-level task[1] is an experiment where participants are shown a bottle with its water level marked and are asked where the water level should be in various rotations of the bottle. Female participants for some reason fail the task at significantly higher rates than male participants, and this test has been replicated all over the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-level_task

I used to do a lot of 3D CAD professionally,and I remember being able to mentally rotate around IKEA instructions no problem. Haven't done that in several years. Now IKEA furniture is much difficult. I question whether this gender difference is nature or nuture.

Same. I'm male, but terrible at these. It has been suggested in some research that being homosexual (like me) results in a "more female" brain. I would be interested to know if this tracks.

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