Sex differences in eye movements and neural oscillations during mental rotation in virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) has been a promising tool for developing visuospatial tasks. Among visuospatial tasks, mental rotation tasks are widely used in the assessment of visuospatial ability. Males have a distinct advantage in mental rotation ability compared to females, yet it is generally produced by investigations based on two-dimensional (2D) images on a computer screen. Sex differences in mental rotation tasks with three-dimensional (3D) objects in VR were not fully investigated. It is unclear whether the male's advantages in 2D mental rotation tasks are weakened in 3D tasks. The aim of this study was to provide new insights into the understanding of sex differences in mental rotation tasks presented in VR. Here, we developed a VR mental rotation task (VR-MRT) using 3D objects presented by a head-mounted display (HMD) and used VR-based eye tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) to examine eye movements and neural oscillations for males and females. Our results showed that females preferred a piecemeal strategy compared to males, suggesting a significant sex difference in visual strategy. More importantly, we found no significant sex differences in alpha-band and beta-band oscillations related to rotation processes of VR-MRT. These findings indicated that sex differences in the VR-MRT were mainly attributed to the selection of visual strategy rather than the rotation processes. The study helps to comprehensively understand the dominant factors contributing to the sex differences in the VR-MRT.