Men really ARE better map readers that women: Researchers say superior spatial abilities evolved so they could travel further to find mates
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It is a row almost every couple has had - is one sex better at reading maps than the other?
Researchers say the now believe the answer is yes - and say they know why.
Scientists studying African tribes say men evolved better spatial abilities so they could roam further in the pursuit of mates.
Men who did better on a spatial task not only traveled farther than other men but also had children with more women, the Utah researchers found.
The University of Utah study tested and interviewed dozens of members of the Twe and Tjimba tribes in northwest Namibia.
They found that men who did better on a spatial task not only traveled farther than other men but also had children with more women, according to the study published this week in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
'It's the first time anybody has tried to draw a line between spatial ability, navigation, range size and reproductive success,' said Layne Vashro, the study's author.
'Navigation ability facilitates traveling longer distances and exploring new environments.
'And the farther you travel, the more likely you are to encounter new mating opportunities.'
There is a demonstrated relationship between sex differences in how far some mammals – including voles and deer mice – range or travel, and sex differences in their spatial and navigation abilities.
But until now, little has been known about this relationship in humans, Vashro claims.
'Among the most consistent sex differences found in the psychological literature are spatial ability and navigation ability, with men better at both.'
'In the anthropological literature, one of the most consistent behavioral differences between men and women is the distance they travel.
'This difference in traveling is assumed to explain the observed differences in spatial ability and navigation ability.
'Now, we've drawn a link between spatial ability and range size.'
'Most of this chain has been assumed in the scientific literature,'Anthropology professor Elizabeth Cashdan, the study's senior author, says,
'Some of the links have been demonstrated, but this study looks at the whole chain and that's what is novel about it.'
University of Utah anthropologist Layne Vashro with a woman from the Twe tribe in Namibia as she performs a mental rotation task on a laptop computer. It was part of a new study that found evidence men evolved better navigation ability than women because men with better ability to manipulate objects in their mind can roam farther and have children with more mates.
Cashdan says spatial skills include 'being able to visualize spatial relationships and manipulate that image in your mind.'
Vashro says an example is to 'visualize how you fit a bunch of things into the back of a truck, and how you could rotate them most efficiently to fit.'
She believes that relative to other cognitive differences between the sexes, such as cultural differences in math skills, the difference in spatial skills is large, and it is found across cultures and in some other species.
'That's why we think it may have evolutionary roots,' she says.
'The argument in the literature is that you need good spatial ability to navigate successfully, and you need to navigate effectively to travel long distances in unfamiliar environments,' Cashdan says.
The new study connected links in that chain.
'These findings offer strong support for the relationship between sex differences in spatial ability and ranging behavior, and identify male mating competition as a possible selective pressure shaping this pattern,' the researchers conclude in their paper.
'Men traveled father than women and to more places than women,' with both findings statistically significant, Cashdan says.
On average, Vashro says, 'men reported visiting 3.4 unique locations across 30 miles per location on average in a year, while women reported visiting only two locations across 20 miles.'
And in the key finding, men who did better on the mental rotation task reported traveling farther both during their lifetime and the past year, compared with men who didn't do as well on the mental rotation task.
There was no difference in range size between women who did better and worse on the mental rotation task
'It looks like men who travel more in the past year also have children from more women – what you would expect if mating was the payoff for travel,' Vashro says.
'Why men should be better at mentally rotating objects is a weird thing,' Cashdan says.
'Some people think it is culturally constructed, but that doesn't explain why the pattern is shared so broadly across human societies and even in some other species.
'The question is why should men get better benefits from spatial ability than women? One hypothesis, which our data support, is that males, more than females, benefit reproductively from getting more mates, and ranging farther is one way they do this.'
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