Abstract: When members of one gender group are targeted by negative stereotypes, threaten feeling can be elicited that might profoundly influence the members cognition. Sixty kindergarten children were randomly chosen and they participated in present study which used implicit stereotype threat task and the Binet pattern and verbal tasks to examine the impact of the gender stereotype threat on the childrens choice of task difficulty as well as the task performance. The results showed that: (1) the experimental group which received the implicit stereotype threat chose significantly lower task difficulty than the control group. (2) As for the task performance, the experimental group get lower scores significantly than the control group on verbal tasks. In light of the reduction of task difficulty the experimental group chose representing the lower expectancy on performance, we concluded that gender stereotype threat impacts the childrens selfefficiency negatively, thereby undermines the experimental groups performance on the cognitive tasks.

Key words: gender stereotype threat, task difficulty, pattern task, verbal task, children