Sex differences in motor skills.

Sex differences in visuomotor tracking

“…In both cases, the male advantage was in the medium to large effect size range (from 0.69 up to 1.25), which are as strong as the largest sex differences reported in other domains 3,31,49 . Our results fit well with earlier studies investigating the effect of sex on manual tracking, even though experimental setups could vary [16][17][18][19] . Importantly, our detailed analyses of hand kinematics suggest that the male advantage in our visuomotor task cannot be explained by the fact that males would produce more sophisticated hand movements.…”

“…Although the current study did not assess participants' level in video games, there are still some concerns with this line of reasoning. First, some studies reporting a male advantage in manual tracking 17 and reaction time 36,40 were performed before the birth of video-games. Second, a recent study performed with men and women having limited experience in video games showed a male advantage in a complex spatially-demanding video game 63 .…”

“…Mapping complex target trajectories with an optimal motor responses implies a series decision-making processes in order to dynamically adapt motor outputs by determining which movement or sub-movement to make and when to make them 34,35 . We reasoned that males advantages in manual tracking that were previously reported [16][17][18][19] could be associated with faster decisional processes dynamically linking visual information of the target with forthcoming hand actions. Such hypothesis was motivated by several studies showing that men exhibit faster reaction times to visual stimuli than women [36][37][38][39][40][41] .…”

“…Such hypothesis was motivated by several studies showing that men exhibit faster reaction times to visual stimuli than women [36][37][38][39][40][41] . Interestingly all previous studies suggesting a male advantage in manual tracking [16][17][18][19] focused on the accuracy of hand movements in the spatial domain but did not characterize their precision in the temporal domain. Here, the temporal lag between hand motion and target motion would be of particular interest as it provides key information about the speed of visuomotor processing.…”

“…Although there is a clear consensus for a male advantage in throwing [13][14][15] , some evidence for a male advantage in visuomotor tracking have been reported [16][17][18][19] but they remain scarce and speak for further confirmation. Our primary objective was therefore to explore the robustness of sex difference in visuomotor tracking by taking advantage of a large dataset that was previously collected in our lab [20][21][22] .…”