differenceblog, posts by tag: toys - LiveJournal

EDIT: Sorry for the double post today. LJ was twitchy this morning
Alexander and Evardone (2008) found that sex differences in performance on a mental rotation task (MRT) could be cut in half by using human figures instead of the traditional block figures. Both men's and women's performance on the MRT was improved by using a human figure, but the improvement to women's performance showed a much stronger effect. The sex of the human figure also seemed to play a role - men's performance with rotated female figures was similar to their performance with blocks, while women showed improvement on both male and female human figure stimuli.

Men still showed a statistically significant advantage with the human figure stimuli. Finger-length ratios (assumed to be indicators of androgen activity) were associated with total correct rotations in men, and with percentage correct rotations in women. The Pre-School Activities Inventory (PSAI, Golombok & Rust, 1993) (a recollection of gendered types of play engaged in as a child) did not show any associations with success in the MRT, or with finger length ratios. The strongest predictor of performance on the MRT was performance on the Extended Range Vocabulary Test - "a control measure of general cognitive ability that does not show a sex difference."

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The theoretical framework proposed by Alexander and Evardone is that childhood play affects spatial sense:

"we reasoned that male-typical play may enhance the mental rotation of replicas of inanimate objects such as vehicles and blocks, whereas female-typical toy play, such as dressing dolls, may enhance the mental rotation of animate forms or body parts."

The results from the PSAI do not seem to support this: participation in masculine-specific play didn't seem to correlate with better spatial rotation. The figure-gender difference makes me wonder if the participants were picturing themselves as the figures, and that perhaps the male participants did not picture themselves as the female figures.

Gerianne M. Alexander's 2003 review suggests that there may be evolutionary reasons why girls prefer some toys and boys prefer others. She suggests that there may be innate visual biases that draw children to specific features of the toys, including color:

Compared to boys, girls are also more likely to use a greater number of colors and to prefer warmer colors (i.e., pink and red) to cooler colors (i.e., blue and green). In toy choices and free drawings, then, boys appear to assign greater attention or interest to object movement and location, whereas girls appear to assign greater attention or interest to form and color."

Suggested explanations for this greater female emphasis on color include aid in foraging, spectral qualities of the human face (apparently males tend to have redder faces), or the idea that infant faces are more red-pink than adult faces.

The traditional assumption has been that children's associations of color with sex role is a socialization artifact. Picariello et al's (1990) experiments seem to show that children as young as 3 identify colors with sex roles. Children were asked to identify the sex of toy pigs who differed only in color, and their choices were consistent with adult sex-color stereotypes.

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So the hypothesis, as far as I can tell, is not that boys like blue, but that girls really like pink. I find Alexander's (2002) study of toy preferences among vervet monkeys interesting, but I question the interpretation of results. I'm fairly certain that a vervet monkey doesn't know what a cooking pot is for. Therefore, the result that more female vervets initiated contact with the pot than with the ball seems like an over extension to me. If there were other features of the pot to explain this (color or decoration) these were not explained in the article.

[edit]: According to Color Matters, pink was traditionally for boys and blue for girls through the 1920's, and in Belgium, this is still the case.