Search for “can women read maps?” and Google will reward you with more than 300,000,000 hits. I haven’t read them all but the first few hits are pretty clear in their verdict, namely that women cannot read maps. And the book, “Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps” is likely at the top of the hits.
Really?
Do women really have more difficulty reading maps than men? Are their navigational skills inferior? If men are better navigators, why did Columbus bump into America while trying to find his way to India? And, by contrast, why did Nancy-Bird Walton found her way around the Australian outback in the 1930s when she ran an air ambulance known as the Royal Far West Children’s Health Scheme?
A recent article in the Psychonomic Society’s journal Memory & Cognition examined the role of sex differences in navigation strategy and efficiency. Researchers Alexander Boone, Xinyi Gong, and Mary Hegarty conducted two experiments using a method known as the “dual-solution paradigm” (DSP). In the DSP, participants first learn a route through a virtual environment presented on a desktop, before being asked to navigate between previously learned locations.
The figure below shows a typical stimulus maze, where each of the diamonds represents a “landmark”, such as a chair, duck, telescope, piano, or wheelbarrow, among other items.
Crucially, participants never see this overhead view. Instead, they explored the space using a virtual-reality display that permitted them to “move” through the maze via mouse and keyboard control. The figure below shows a snapshot of what a participant might see when they explore the maze:
During the training phase, participants followed red arrows on the ground to navigate, while taking note of the landmarks along the way. (You spotted the wheelbarrow, didn’t you?)
The overhead view in the earlier figure shows the training path, which took participants past all the landmarks. Participants followed this prescribed route 5 times, and they were barred (by invisible walls) to deviate from the route even though they could look through all the open spaces (“corridors”) that they passed.
Following a short break, participants were placed in different starting locations and were given the task of navigating to another landmark. There were 24 such trials, and the question of interest was whether participants would follow the single learned path they had acquired during training or whether they would take shortcuts through the corridors that were now open.
The figure below shows two possible paths that a person might take on one particular trial. The top path represents a shortcut and is the most efficient way to get to the goal. The bottom path, by contrast, follows the learned path. It will also get you to the goal, but by a more circuitous route.
The results from two experiments are shown in the figure below, broken down by sex. (The differences between the two experiments were slight and need not concern us here.)
The most striking aspect of the results is that the most frequent solution paths involved a shortcut. The use of shortcuts that could not have been traversed during training indicates that people acquired some form of mental map of the entire space, despite never having access to the overhead view. The learned path, by contrast, was used less often than shortcuts.
Another interesting aspect of the results is that a “reverse learned” path was almost as popular as the learned path: this refers to a simple back-track manoeuvre, where people travelled backwards along the learned path to reach their goal.
And yes, there were some striking sex differences.
The figure shows that men preferred shortcuts over the learned path to a far greater extent than women. In consequence, when considering the overall efficiency of navigation (e.g., time to reach a goal) men performed significantly better than women. This effect remained even when controlling for strategy. One possible reason for this remaining difference is that, overall, men tend to play video games more frequently than women, and the added experience with virtual-reality displays and interfaces may have allowed the men to be quicker in this task than the women, even if they had equal navigational skills.
A final intriguing aspect of the results is the incidence of the “wandering” strategy, which although rare was observed more frequently in women than men. The figure below shows an example of a wandering strategy, whereby the goal is reached by seemingly random or arbitrary exploration of the space.
In the first experiment, 28 out of 40 females (70%) wandered on at least one trial, whereas 17 out of 28 males (60%) wandered on at least one trial. This suggests that on those trials participants had no knowledge of the location of the goal and were also unsure whether they could reach it along the learned path. Or maybe they had an entirely different agenda altogether?
Boone and colleagues pointed to an important question raised by those results, namely whether “navigation strategy is determined by one’s ability to construct a survey-like representation of the environment (i.e., a cognitive map) or whether other factors affect strategy.”
That is, shortcuts can only be taken by people who have an accurate representation of the overall space—people who only learned the sequence of left and right turns to traverse the training path cannot use shortcuts. However, it does not follow that if people do not use shortcuts, they do not have a suitable representation of the space. People may prefer to take learned routes because it seems easier, appears less risky, or may require less time for decision making.
The findings of Boone and colleagues thus point to the need to study the relationship between navigational ability and strategy choice more closely. After all, the choice to wander through a maze to find a telescope, rather than rushing there directly, may not necessarily reflect a lack of skill or knowledge: one may simply be following the teachings of the Zhuangzi (476–221 BC), that to be an enlightened person, one “wanders through all of creation, enjoying its delights without ever becoming attached to any one part of it.”
Psychonomics article featured in this blogpost:
Boone, A.P., Gong, X., & Hegarty, M. (2018). Sex Differences in Navigation Strategy and Efficiency. Memory & Cognition. DOI: 10.3758/s13421-018-0811-y.