Spatial Skills At about 11 years of age, buys begin to score better on tasks involving mathematies and spartal skills. The term sparal skills reters to the ability to imagine how something would look in space — for example, getting a three-dimensional image of the parting lot with the cars parked at right angles to the curb and then mentally rotating the cars so that they are parted parallel to the curb. Video games involve considerable sparal sulls- In general, boys are better at these games than girls. but there is a "trick" here in that gils don't stills quite well. There also are unexplamed research findings such as this one: Astudy of 3.000 students found that 13 year old girls scored better on sparal skills than boys the same age (Meece etal., 1982). Generally speaking, training does increase girls spatial reasoning skuls and their performance on most -but not all-such tests (Vas- ta, Knott, & Gage, 1946). At the moment. Whatever ditterences exist are best explained as resulting from differences in social role, social class, ethnic background, and the typeot test given, rather than from clear dufferences between the sexes. Some people have suggested that the brains of males mignt be physically different from those of females. Indeed, the brains to differ: Certan areas in the brains of one sex have more cells than the same areas in the brains of the other sex and wee vessa, but to date we have not been able to relate these facts to any differences in mental abilitles.