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| Volume 10, Number 6 | November 01, 2002 |
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U of S research finds Tarzan & Jane navigate differently- Psychologist says men use sense of direction, women use landmarks - By Kristina Bergen
While Tarzan swung through the jungle following his keen sense of direction, Jane used landmarks such as the tree house to find her way. Why? Because men and women navigate differently. A University of Saskatchewan-led study published in the June issue of Behavioural Neuroscience confirms that the way you navigate between one destination and the next depends on whether you are male or female. Women are better at finding their way using landmark guides, while men navigate better following cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) and exact measures of distance. Psychologist Deborah Saucier thinks navigational differences between men and women are the result of evolution. "In the hunter/gatherer era, both men and women contributed to survival by providing food," said Saucier. "Men would travel far from home to hunt meat, following game as it moved. To get back home, they could either trace back the exact path they had come or shortcut." Shortcutting most likely involves a right-brain function that men use to visualize abstract spatial relationships. Hunters had to know where home was located in relation to the direction they were travelling so they could find their way back from the hunt. "Once men developed the ability to shortcut, they could get meat home to families faster, while it was still fresh, and didn't have to travel as far on the way back as they had in the original pursuit of game," says Saucier, an Assistant Professor of Psychology. Women's contributions took place much closer to home and may have involved left-brain linguistic abilities that used verbal descriptions of landmarks. "Plants are stationary and usually reappear in the same place from season to season, so women didn't have to travel long distances to harvest them," said Saucier. "But they did need to remember where certain plants grew, which areas had already been harvested each season, and where they had hidden food. "For instance, if women went berry picking more than once in the same season, it would be useless to return to an area where they had already picked the bushes clean. They relied on landmark guides to remember where food was and what had already been gathered from a specific area." Funded by NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council), the study involved two tasks that tested navigational ability. The first task challenged 42 students - 20 men and 22 women - to find four unknown destinations on a university campus. Half the men and women were given instructions to follow cardinal directions and exact distances, such as "Go east for 50 metres, then proceed north for 100 metres." The other half followed sequential photos of landmarks with instructions such as "Turn left at the purple doors." For the second task, 40 U of S students - 20 men and 20 women - charted a course on a map. Half the men and women followed cardinal directions and exact distances while the other half followed landmark guides. Results show that women reach their destinations faster if they follow landmarks and men reach their destinations faster following cardinal directions. Intrigued by these differences between men and women, journalists on every continent have written about Saucier's work. "Ever since the media started to write about this study, I've been getting the strangest phone calls about gender differences," says Saucier. "Just the other day someone called and wanted to know why women can't parallel park. I said I didn't know they couldn't." The SPARK (Students Promoting Awareness of Research Knowledge) Program is run out of U of S Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research.
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