Sex Differences in the Haptic Change Task

Three experiments examined gender differences in picture location memory in the sense of touch involving the change task. In Experiments 1 and 2, blindfolded sighted participants felt 15 tangible raised-line pictures and memorized their locations for 8 min. Subsequently, they felt another set of raised-line pictures that were identical to the original set, but locations were exchanged for 6 of them. The change task required participants to indicate which raised-line pictures were moved to new locations and which were not moved. It was expected that females would show superior picture location memory compared with males. The results showed that females had a significantly higher number of correct picture location judgments than males in Experiment 1. No differences appeared between males and females on the change task when the task was much more difficult and the raised-line pictures were irregularly arrayed in the second experiment. Task difficulty was too high in Experiment 2, and a third experiment reduced the number of pictures in the irregular array to 12. Females performed better than males in Experiment 3. Gender differences in the change task are small in magnitude in touch as well as in vision. The results of the present experiments using touch are consistent with the larger literature in vision.