The Gender Differences In The Controlled Attention Processing Of College Students

Attention inhibition plays a very important role in individual learning and life.It enables us to focus on the current task and not be interfered by other stimuli.There are many factors that affect the level of attentional inhibition,such as individual differences,gender differences and task difficulty.The gender difference of executive function has always been an interesting topic for researchers.Studies have shown that women and men perform different cognitive tasks.Previous studies have found gender differences in selective attention,and women are more likely to be affected by irrelevant spatial cues than men.The research on gender differences also focuses on the differences of spatial processing.There are many studies on gender differences based on foreign studies,and the ultimate cause of these differences is still difficult to determine.Therefore,this study investigated gender differences in attentional inhibition by controlling task type and spatial location.This study consists of two experiments.In Experiment 1,the gender differences of three executive functions of 98 college students(55 men and 43 women)were investigated by using the task of color dots updating,the task of stroop and the task of more-odd shifting.The results showed that there was a significant gender difference in the task of color dots updating involving spatial location cues.Therefore,in Experiment 2,we included spatial location into independent variables to explore the influence of spatial location on gender and inhibition tasks.Experiment 2uses Eyelink 1000 Plus eye movement recorder was used to investigate the gender differences of attentional inhibition of 29 college students in different spatial positions by using a three factor mixed experimental design of 2 task types(toward eye hop,reverse eye hop)× 2 spatial positions(vertical,horizontal)× 2 gender(male,female).The results showed that there were significant gender differences in antisaccade task and spatial position.Compared with women,men have shorter latency of correct saccade in antisaccade tasks and different spatial orientations.In addition,the main effects of task type and spatial location are significant.Combined with the above experimental results,the following conclusions are obtained:(1)Task types affect individual response time and error rate.In the first saccade latency and the first directional saccade error rate of antisaccade task was significantly higher than that of prosaccade task;(2)Male’s attentional inhibition performance is better than female’s and male’s response to spatial orientation is more sensitive.Men’s response speed to different tasks is faster,and the saccade latency to different spatial positions is shorter;(3)In different types of saccade tasks,spatial position effect appears,and horizontal direction is better than vertical direction.Horizontal target stimuli are more likely to capture attention.The latency of horizontal correct saccade is shorter,and the error rate of reverse saccade is higher.