“Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan 

Like Peter Pan, I’m a landmark kind-of-navigator and my navigation is spot on once I have a good idea of the space. As a 5-yr-old, I took my 3-yr-old brother on an adventure through the streets of our neighborhood from our house to a family friend’s house with only our big wheels and my memory of the path from various car rides. Our dad had no idea that we had left the house to find our mom. Needless to say, our mom was quite surprised to see us riding up to her friend’s house without our father trailing behind. 

To this day, I consider it a challenge to learn the fastest navigation routes with and without Google maps when traveling to new places. However, when asked for directions, people need to be ready for the “head towards the roller coaster,” “turn at the gas station,” “go through 2 lights and 2 stop signs,” and “turn at the second stop sign when you pass the blue water tower,” I honestly have no idea how far a couple of miles or km is while driving, and to figure out directions, I have to think about where the sun is and then go around my compass while facing the sun. Obviously, this strategy does not work at night.

I like to think of myself as a wanna-be bee. This bee uses the sun to orient to the hive and food and then guesstimate distances using landmarks, when possible, being sure to not stray too far from the hive after dark. 

While I think route strategies are the best (as do many women), landmark-based wayfaring is often inefficient. Orientation strategies, or the cardinal direction kind-of-people, such as my spouse and many other men, are much more effective comparatively. Interestingly, an orientation strategy does not mean a guaranteed sense of direction. I often joke with my spouse that he should go in the direction opposite of what he thinks he should.

Our experiences deviate somewhat from the stereotypes and evidence surrounding wayfinding: men are often better at spatial navigation and will use cardinal directions in wayfinding whereas women are not quite as good at spatial navigation and tend to use landmarks for wayfinding. My husband and I make an excellent wayfinding team. As kids, we were both encouraged to get out of the house and explore, ride bikes, see our friends, etc., and it is these kinds of early experiences that the authors of the paper focused on in this post attempted to tackle. 

Vanessa Vieites, Shannon Pruden, and Bethany Reeb-Sutherland explored the possible origins of the only substantiated cognitive difference between the sexes: spatial reasoning. Although this sex difference disappears with spatial training, this study is critical to learning where early interventions may be most beneficial.

The scientists conducted a retrospective study with university students regarding their current spatial navigation strategies and their recollection of childhood experiences. Published in the Psychonomic Society’s Cognitive Journal: Principles and Implications, Vieites and her colleagues asked college students about their time spent outdoors and distance traveled while exploring as children between 6 and 15 years of age. They were interested in the relationship between childhood spatial experiences, young adult wayfinding strategy use, and their current level of anxiety when navigating.

In a relatively even sample of men and women, men reported spending significantly more time outdoors and traveling farther distances than women as children. Also, as anticipated, the men were more likely to use an orientation strategy while the women were more likely to use a route strategy. However, both used both strategies. Finally, women reported having more wayfinding anxiety than men. 

Clearly, these results validate and extend previous findings, but did these childhood experiences matter for spatial navigation as an adult? The scientists concluded yes.

In a series of mediation analyses in which trait anxiety was controlled (to remove this additional confound), Vieites and colleagues learned that distance traveled was associated with strategy use. The figure below shows the mediated effect for distance traveled. Less distance traveled was associated with a greater use of a route strategy (by women as indicated by the negative correlations for both the bottom arrow and top right arrow). More distance traveled was not necessarily associated with greater use of an orientation strategy (by men or women). 

Interestingly, the amount of time spent outside did not affect any of the results by itself but did mediate greater route strategy use by women (less route strategy use by men) when combined with distance traveled for the total childhood wayfinding experience.

Wayfinding anxiety was also mediated directly and indirectly by sex. The figure below illustrates that women reported more wayfinding anxiety directly (bottom arrow in figure) and when the amount of distance traveled was controlled. Men reported less wayfinding anxiety than women (top right arrow in figure). Whether wayfinding anxiety is driven by the fear of getting lost or the fear for personal safety for women, additional research is needed to unravel this question. 

Finally, Vieites and colleagues performed a reverse causal mediation to determine if wayfinding anxiety influences the strategy used by participants or the reverse, when sex and overall trait anxiety were controlled. They found that less distance traveled was related to a route strategy both directly (bottom arrow in figure below) and indirectly. That is, the greater the degree of wayfinding anxiety reported, the greater the degree of route strategy used (top right arrow in second figure below). 

The authors acknowledged that since this study was correlational (as well as retrospective and potentially subject to bias in memory recall), the results need to be bolstered by longitudinal and prospective research. Young adult women may be more likely to use a landmark-based route strategy for navigation because they traveled less distance as children during explorations, which may have led to greater anxiety possibly due to personal safety and a lack of familiarity with navigation. However, this conclusion is questioned because an orientation strategy was not directly predicted by childhood experience or wayfinding anxiety either. Rather, as Vieites and her colleagues concluded, childhood exploration may provide children opportunities to eliminate inefficient strategies and when exploration is limited, the trial and error process of efficient wayfinding may not occur often enough.

The bottom line – “Would you like an adventure now, or would like to have your tea first?” by J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan,1904), seems to be the critical question when it comes to wayfinding and spatial navigation for boys and girls.

I suspect that Vieites and her colleagues would argue to go on an adventure now.

Featured Psychonomic Society article

Vieites, V., Pruden, S. M., & Reeb-Sutherland, B. C. (2020). Childhood wayfinding experience explains sex and individual differences in adult wayfinding strategy and anxiety. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-00220-x