What is it with women and maps?

Without wanting to fuel too many Christmas dinner table arguments, there is a lot of research showing that men do perform better than women on specific spatial tasks. However, these researchers wanted to determine whether this a culturally driven phenomenon or one shaped hormones.

To do this the researchers had female and male subjects wear 3-D goggles and use a joystick to try and orient themselves in a maze while MRI scans measured the activity that was going on in their brains. The subjects were given 45 navigational tasks, each one to be completed in 30 seconds. The results showed that men solved 50 per cent more of the tasks than women. Beyond this though were some interesting findings.

So women are better at finding things in the house while men are better at finding the house.

It emerged that when men navigated they used the hippocampus in the brain where the women tended to use the frontal areas of the brain. This ties in with how the two sexes differ in their navigation. Men use cardinal directions when they navigate meaning that they go in the general direction of where they need to be and the hippocampus is necessary to make use of cardinal directions. In contrast, women tend to orient themselves along a route in order to navigate so thinking of landmarks to pass and make changes at direction at. This requires the frontal areas of the brain. Men tend to do better at destination reaching because a strategy based on cardinal directions means it depends less on where you start.

However, that doesn’t mean one sex is overall better than the other in this regard. The researchers say that the different navigational approaches mean that women are better at finding things locally than men; so women are better at finding things in the house while men are better at finding the house.

To see if hormones are the basis of this sex difference, the researchers repeated the experiment with two new groups of women; one group received a placebo drop under the tongue while the other received a drop of testosterone. The results showed that testosterone did not lead to women solving more maze tasks but some women did show a greater ability to orient themselves using cardinal directions.

The results are hardly conclusive as the causality of the differences in spatial and directional skill abilities of women and men but they do reinforce that we go nicely together, and long may the differences exist.