Gender Differences in Haptic Parallelity Matching

Previous studies have reported gender differences in performance when two bars have to be set parallel to each other haptically, with females having significantly larger deviations than males. Recent results comparing male participants with and without action video game experience showed that the former performed significantly better than the latter in the aforementioned haptic parallelity task. Considering that males more often engage in action video gaming, the observed performance differences between male and female participants might be related to gaming experience rather than gender. This was investigated in the current study by comparing haptic parallelity performance in males with action video gaming experience and in males and females without this experience. The results showed that male participants with as well as without action video gaming experience performed significantly better than female participants. These results suggest that differences in haptic parallelity matching between males and females seem to be related to gender, rather than action video gaming experience. When performing the parallelity task visually, no significant differences were found between the three groups, corroborating earlier hypotheses that women are less able to ignore the bias of the egocentric hand-centered reference frame than men when haptically paralleling orientations.