Gender Differences in Auditory Perception and Computational Divided Attention Tasks

Women have been stereotyped as better multitaskers when compared to their male counterparts. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there are differences in gender performance when performing cognitive combined tasks. Twenty-four graduate students (twelve females and twelve males) volunteered to participate in the study. The task required participants to indicate when they perceived a change in the intensity of an auditory signal while simultaneously solving algebraic problems. MANOVA results revealed no significant differences between genders when performing the combined tasks (p = 0.1831 and λ = 0.7891) although the average number of false alarms made during the combined tasks by males was nearly 11% higher than the average number of false alarms made by females. However, ANOVA results for the combined tasks showed that males outperformed females on the computational task while listening for changes in the auditory signal F(1, 22) = 5.09, p < 0.03, but there were no significant differences in their ability to detect noise intensity variation or in the number of false alarms made while multitasking. For the single task analysis the ANOVAs indicated no significant differences in signal detection task performance, computational task performance, or the number of false alarms made by males and females.