PARIS: Are women really better at multi-tasking? A study on Wednesday said a tricky brain-teaser throws off men’s walking gait but leaves most women unfazed, reopening an age-old debate about mental gender differences.
On a treadmill, men — and women over 60 — started swinging their right arm less while grappling with a complicated language test, researchers found.
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Language function and right arm swing are both thought to be controlled mainly by the brain’s left hemisphere.
“Women under 60 seemed to be resistant to this effect, as they were able to perform the verbal task with no change in arm swing,” said study co-author Tim Killeen, a neuroscientist from the University Hospital Balgrist in Switzerland.
“In men and older women, the verbal task appears to overwhelm the left brain to the extent that the movement of the arm on the right is reduced.”
The “unexpected” findings were published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
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“We were surprised to find such a consistent gender difference in how two relatively simple behaviours — cognitive control and arm swing — interact with one another,” Killeen told AFP.
The team had set out to study how people walk under different conditions, aiming to build a database of “normal” gait profiles for treating people with walking disorders.
They used infrared cameras to record the treadmill walking patterns of 83 healthy people, aged 18 to 80.
The participants were asked to walk — first normally, and then while performing a verbal task called the Stroop test.
Developed in the 1930s, the test involves printing the name of a colour — such as “red”, “green” or “blue” — in a non-matching colour, then asking a person to say the colour of the ink, not the word itself.
