VR Research Finds Large Sex Difference in Navigational Efficiency
After spending a day exploring a new city and it’s time to return to your hotel, do you tend to rely on landmarks and routes that you’ve learned, or do you consult a “mental map” that you’ve created of the area, to try to devise a short-cut back? If you’re a man, you’re more likely to try the latter – whereas women tend to use routes they know, according to a new paper in Memory and Cognitionby researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Earlier studies have either found no gender differences on navigation challenges, or found that the male participants did better. This study goes a little further, in that it investigates the kinds of strategies that men and women tend to choose themselves. (Interestingly, the strategies that the participants actually used didn’t match up well with the kinds of strategies they reported generally taking.)
See the full story here: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/09/11/virtual-reality-research-finds-large-sex-difference-in-navigational-efficiency/