The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task

Brain Sciences

Massimiliano Palmiero¹  Alessia Bocchi²  Laura Piccardi²  Raffaella Nori³  Laura Tascón⁴  JoseManuel Cimadevilla Redondo⁵ 

[1] Biotechnological and Applied Clinical Sciences, University of L’Aquila, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy;Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy;Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy;Department of Psychology, University of Cordoba, 14014 Cordoba, Spain;Health Research Center and Department of Psychology, University of Almería, 04120 Almería, Spain;

关键词: spatial navigation;    sex differences;    environment familiarity;    spatial learning;    spatial knowledge;    route;   

DOI  :  10.3390/brainsci11060681

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Individual factors like gender and familiarity can affect the kind of environmental representation that a person acquires during spatial navigation. Men seem to prefer relying on map-like survey representations, while women prefer using sequential route representations. Moreover, a good familiarity with the environment allows more complete environmental representations. This study was aimed at investigating gender differences in two different object-position learning tasks (i.e., Almeria Boxes Tasks) assuming a route or a survey perspective also considering the role of environmental familiarity. Two groups of participants had to learn the position of boxes placed in a virtual room. Participants had several trials, so that familiarity with the environment could increase. In both tasks, the effects of gender and familiarity were found, and only in the route perspective did an interaction effect emerge. This suggests that gender differences can be found regardless of the perspective taken, with men outperforming women in navigational tasks. However, in the route task, gender differences appeared only at the initial phase of learning, when the environment was unexplored, and disappeared when familiarity with the environment increased. This is consistent with studies showing that familiarity can mitigate gender differences in spatial tasks, especially in more complex ones.

【 授权许可】

Unknown