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

Alessia Bocchi,Jose Manuel Cimadevilla Redondo,Laura Tascón,Massimiliano Palmiero,Laura Piccardi,Raffaella Nori

doi:10.3390/brainsci11060681

Abstract

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.

Highlights

When it is necessary to remember an object’s location in the environment, humans can refer to their own position using an “egocentric frame of reference” (e.g., ‘the fountain is at my left’), or refer to the spatial and configurational properties of such objects, using an “allocentric frame of reference” (e.g., ‘the fountain is at the left of the shop’) [1,2]
There were no significant differences between men and women in all the familiarity levels.The present paper was aimed at investigating gender differences in two spatial learning tasks, considering two modalities of environmental knowledge acquisition
In(route the Survey ing tasks, considering two of environmental knowledge acquisition and task, anand effect was found forthe familiarity with aWe decreasing number of errors passing from survey) familiarity with environment

Summary

Introduction

When it is necessary to remember an object’s location in the environment, humans can refer to their own position using an “egocentric frame of reference” (e.g., ‘the fountain is at my left’), or refer to the spatial and configurational properties of such objects, using an “allocentric frame of reference” (e.g., ‘the fountain is at the left of the shop’) [1,2] These two frames of reference lead to acquisition of two different types of spatial representations: one named route, and the other named survey, respectively [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Gender and familiarity, which the present paper is focused on, play a crucial role

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