This study investigated sex differences in young children's spatial skill.
The authors developed a spatial transformation task, which showed a substan
tial male advantage by age 4 years 6 months. The size of this advantage was
no more robust for rotation items than for translation items. This finding
contrasts with studies of older children and adults, which report that sex
differences are largest on mental rotation tasks. Comparable performance o
f boys and girls on a vocabulary task indicated that the male advantage on
the spatial task was not attributable to an overall intellectual advantage
of boys in the sample.