Much research has highlighted differences between women and men in spatial ability. However, these results continue to arouse curiosity, because it remains difficult to give a clear picture.
Among the explanations, we can highlight a general recursive hypothesis suggesting that gender differences are the result of differences in the strategies used to process information. Although attractive, the notion of strategy encompasses almost all cognitive operations making this hypothesis impossible to test. One way to disentangle the problem is a systematic testing of some functions thought to be fundamental.
To this end, this study explored gender differences in recognition memory, confidence rating and reaction time with the help of a single task including discrimination of rotated geometric patterns. Data were analyzed by classical methods based on the proportion of corrects responses and by signal detection theory parameters. Among findings, we highlight changes in SDT parameters leading to a counterintuitive hypothesis that a more difficult task is likely to increase women's performance. This suggests that among processes involved in discrimination ability changes in attentional processes might be a key factor to explain variation in performance.