Man vs Woman: who has better navigation skills? [POLL]

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Testosterone may be the reason why men have better navigation skills and why they get there more effectively. Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that there is a connection between hormone levels and navigation skills.

Carl Pintzka, lead researcher and PhD candidate at the university, and his colleagues tested the theory by asking 18 male and 18 female participants to undergo a series of test. They found that men tend to user cardinal directions when navigating, which means they go in the general direction of where they are supposed to go to. 

"World-centered strategy means the use of a cognitive map and cardinal directions to find your way," Pintzka told Huffington Post. "Women, on the other hand, used a more egocentric strategy (self-centered), which means they relied more on a route of landmarks to get to the target."

The researchers found the strategy by men to be faster and more effective because they completed a lot more tasks by 50 percent compared to women.

"Men's sense of direction was more effective," Pintzka said via EurekAlert. "They quite simply got to their destination faster."

The participants underwent brain scans to reveal the brain activity between the two genders. Men mainly used the hippocampus, part of the brain that uses cardinal directions, while the women used the pre- and orbitofrontal cortex of the brain, a region associated with decision-making.

Pintzka points out that how the genders evolved in ancient times may have something to do with it.

"In ancient times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Therefore, our brains probably evolved differently," Pintzka said, as reported by Fox News. "For instance, other researchers have documented that women are better at finding objects locally than men. In simple terms, women are faster at finding things in the house, and men are faster at finding the house."

In the series of tests by the researchers, women were given some testosterone under the tongue before solving puzzles. This was a different group of participants and 42 women were either given a placebo or testosterone.

"Our results demonstrate that testosterone had an enhancing effect on certain aspects of spatial cognition in healthy women, but that complex behaviors such as navigation, relying more on learned strategies, are not altered despite increased neuronal activity in relevant brain regions," Pintzka said, reported HuffPost. "These findings suggest that the male navigation advantage mainly reflects sex differences in behavioral strategy."

The research was done in order to find out why women are more prone to Alzheimer's disease. Tech Times reports that women are more vulnerable to this disease and that sense of direction is one of the first that gets affected.