Must Know: Why Men Have Greater Navigation Skills Compared To Women

Men usually make fun of women that they are not good at reading maps and navigating through it. But, scientists have found out that this attitude makes women feel nervous and are likely to avoid maps altogether.

Spatial awareness and visualization are stereotypically male-centered abilities. From navigation to assembling flat-packed furniture found to have been linked to success in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics professionals which men do dominate.

According to Daily Mail, the researchers from King's College London surveyed 1,400 sets of gender twins aged 19 to 21. They asked them to record their anxiety levels from one to five. They found out that female twins across mathematics and navigation skills have significantly higher anxiety.

"Women who value mathematics, and are acquainted with the social stereotype that women tend not to do as well as men in mathematics. They tend to be most sensitive to the pressure of gender stereotype and to feel anxious about it," as published in the Journal of Scientific Reports.

Men and women share similar genes for spatial and mathematics anxiety which causes 37 percent of the navigational nervousness and 30 percent for visualization tasks. But, the situation is different when genetic factors alone are considered.

Although genes may cause disruptions to the brain's system for visual working memory, a non-shared environment also found to explain the rest of the differences between people in spatial anxiety. This makes female up to 5.5 percent more likely to be anxious in all aspects.

Another study also suggests that men do employ better navigational strategies than women. According to Huffington Post, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology asked 18 males and 18 female participants to use 3D goggles and a joystick for one hour to orient themselves in a virtual maze game.

The participants are then given 30 seconds for each of 45 various navigational tasks while measuring their brain activity using fMRI. The results show that men possess effective ways in spatial awareness and navigation strategies.

Carl Pintzka, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at the Norwegian University and the lead author of the study said in a statement that men's sense of direction is more effective than women. "They get simply get to their destination faster."

Men used a world-centered strategy which is more flexible since having a sense of direction is less dependent on the starting point. "Men use their cardinal directions more in their navigations, while women use more egocentric strategy, which means they relied more on a route of landmarks to get the target," Pintzka told the Huffington post in an email.

fMRI scans also revealed several brain activity differences between sexes. Men's hypothalamus - a region of the brain that helps to make cardinal directions, is used more while women relied more on the pre-and orbitofrontal cortex of the brain which is involved in decision-making.