AS ANYONE who has travelled with someone of the opposite sex knows, probably to their cost, men and women navigate in different ways. But an attempt to uncover the reason behind this has thrown up a strange result.
It鈥檚 known that women tend to use landmarks and relative directions such as 鈥渓eft鈥� and 鈥渞ight鈥�, while men tend to think more in distances and 鈥渆ast鈥� and 鈥渨est鈥�. Brain imaging has even shown that the two sexes use different parts of their brains when navigating (快猫短视频, 25 March 2000, p 13).
The sexes also fare differently on pencil and paper tasks: females are better at locating obscured objects, but males are better at mentally rotating them. But which comes first? Do women, for instance, pay more attention to landmarks, and therefore do better on object identification tasks, or vice versa?
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To find out, Jean Choi at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta tested nearly 600 schoolchildren aged between 9 and 17. They did a battery of tests examining mental rotation, spatial perception and object memory. At the tender age of nine, boys and girls already performed differently on these tests. But despite this difference in skills, young children of both sexes used the same strategies when asked to look at a map and give directions. It isn鈥檛 until puberty, Choi found, that the differences in navigation style emerge.
That suggests that hormones such as testosterone and oestrogen bring out the differences, though it鈥檚 not clear exactly how. Choi speculates that the differences are a hangover from our hunter-gatherer days, when men had to hunt over large distances while women gathered food locally. That doesn鈥檛 mean women are less good at navigating, she says 鈥� they simply use different techniques.
