STEREOTYPE THREAT AND ITS EFFECT ON MENTAL ROTATION
As a society, we often tend to lean more towards subjects that provide some sort of visual evidence and casualty. From historic artifacts that illustrate different cultural practices and beliefs, to the big bang theory and evolutionism, we as humans like to find comfort in facts; or what we think are facts. Along with biological nature and it’s initial binary structure of the sexes (being male or female), we (humans) have always tried to apply and find differences with the gender system. Whether males are naturally stronger than females or females naturally better caregivers than males, the list goes on and on. However, one of the more controversial topics related to gender is related to intelligence and cognition skills. Whether men are better at math than women or whether women are better at multi-tasking than men. More specifically to the experiment discussed in this paper, whether women perform less effectively than men regarding mental rotation tasks. There is evidence, however, gender may be causal to cognitive abilities such as spatial awareness. are to gender. Furthermore, whether there is a difference or not between male and female performance outcomes, there is no sure-fire way to attribute the differences to gender itself. However, we can create a system which may show correlation to how outcomes on special recognition tasks can be affected. Spatial sense and cognitive abilities may actually be affected by sociological factors such as stereotypes, which can further identify what exactly may be the reason(s) for these differences among males and females.

Methods
Participants
The participants in this study (N=42) were female college students. They were recruited throughout the urban CUNY Hunter College campus during the day and were approached and asked if they would partake in the experiment while being shown mental rotation example images (reflected image and rotated image) that were from the experiment.

Design and Procedure
In designing this experiment my partner and I utilized the Super Lab program software. Upon being recruited the participants were brought to the testing room where they were further instructed on what the experiment embodied and how they should perform. A total of 42 students were recruited with all of them being exposed to the three different conditions (stereotype threat, stereotype boost, neutral). The students were divided evenly amongst the different conditions (14 students per each condition). For the stereotype boost condition, the participants were told that women generally performed better than men on the mental rotation tasks, while the opposite was said for the stereotype threat condition. In the neutral condition, the participants were neither told that women perform better or worse than men. The participants were then given their consent forms which they signed before starting the experiment stating that they were recruited and a part of this experiment willingly and could leave at any moment if they wanted. Before starting the experiment the participants were allowed two to three practice trials so that they could get an understanding of the experiment. At the beginning of the experiment the first two slides were instruction based informing the participant when they should press either S or K keys on the keyboard. Pressing the S key meant that they were the same image and pressing the K key meant that the images were different. Upon finishing the experiment the participants were immediately congratulated and shown their scores. They were then debriefed and told which condition they were administered and how that condition should have affected their scores.

Results
The means of the different conditions differed only slightly. In the neutral stimulus the mean was the highest at 22.88 with a std. dev of 3.52. In the stereotype boost the mean was 20.38 being the second highest among the conditions with a std. dev of 3.89. In the stereotype threat condition the mean was 18.35 being the lowest with a standard deviation of 5.47. In running an ANOVA test, there was a statistically significant difference between the accuracy of participants’ scores under the different conditions. F(2,1)= 4.36 p<.0.5 The Bonferroni revealed a main effect p=.015 between the neutral stereotype condition and the stereotype threat condition. There is an effect on the neutral stereotype and stereotype threat condition. Furthermore, these two conditions showed a statistically significant difference. This means that the exposure of the neutral stereotype and stereotype threat influenced the participants’ performance on the mental rotation task. participants (women) performed with less accuracy than those who received the neutral stereotype.