Abstract
Females enjoy an advantage on tasks requiring fine visuomotor control. Our work using the grooved pegboard (GPB) supports these findings, but why do females exhibit this advantage. Peters argued this advantage arose because females have smaller fingers. Indeed he found when peg placing times were corrected for finger size the female advantage disappeared. In this study we reasoned that if finger size is important, the female advantage should be sensitive to the size of the pegs: this advantage should be reduced when using larger pegs. We also explored an alternate explanation: the demands of the task for fine visuomotor control. This factor was examined by comparing two subtasks in the GPB, the place task involving picking up the pegs from a receptacle and placing them in the holes and the replace task which involved removing the pegs from the board and replacing them in the receptacle. Our work has shown that the place task requires greater visuomotor control. Accordingly if the female advantage is sensitive to these demands it should be larger in the more demanding place task. Our study involving 32 females and 30 males revealed that the female advantage was significantly larger for the small than the large pegs, but did not change as a function of task. These findings support the importance of finger size as an explanation for the female advantage. The implications of these findings for understanding gender differences in visuomotor tasks will be examined.Acknowledgments: NSERC (EAR & PJB)