Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2018
Abstract
Gender differences have been identified in many tasks, and the male advantage in spatial skills has been well studied and is thought to be robust, especially on mental rotation and spatial perception tasks (e.g., Doyle & Voyer, 2016; Linn & Petersen, 2016; Pansu et al., 2016; Thompson & Voyer, 2014). However, women have been found to do better on tasks that require memorization of where objects are located in the environment (i.e., object location memory tasks; Voyer, Postma, Brake, & lmperato-McGinley, 2007). The purpose of this study was to examine how stereotype threat, elicited in women, would affect their performance in an object location memory task. Mediating factors such as gender identification and state anxiety were also analyzed. Participants were randomly assigned either to a group that would be presented with the stereotype threat or one that did not receive the threat. It was hypothesized that those in the threat group would have poorer performance compared to those not threatened. An independent samples t-test was used to analyze the performance on an object location memory task. No significant difference on object location memory scores was found between the participants who were presented with the stereotype threat and those who were not. However, a significant negative correlation was found between participant's state anxiety and their gender identification in the threat group.
Recommended Citation
Boomgarden, Samantha A., "The Impact of Stereotype Threat on Object Location Memory" (2018). Undergraduate Honors Theses. 117.
https://thekeep.eiu.edu/honors_theses/117
