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

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.

Keywords: environment familiarity; route; sex differences; spatial knowledge; spatial learning; spatial navigation; survey; virtual environments.

Figure 1

Four examples of the Route Task in the virtual room. Participant can move around the room with a joystick using a first person, egocentric perspective. Note that boxes are brown, and they changed their colour when opened. Green boxes represent right choices whereas red boxes indicate errors.

Figure 2

Four examples of the Survey Task in the virtual room. Participant saw the same virtual room as in the Route task, but from different points of view and could not move around. They could use a mouse to select the boxes to open.

Figure 3

The number of errors made by the two groups (M = male group: blue line; F= female group, green line), among the three conditions (three, five and seven reward boxes) in the Route task. Asterisks indicate the significant differences between groups or conditions within groups.

Figure 4

The number of errors made by the two groups (M = male group: blue line; F= female group, green line), among the three conditions (three, five and seven reward boxes) in the Survey task. Asterisks indicate the significant differences between groups or conditions within groups.