A man might get to work by driving a mile, turning left, going six blocks and turning right, while a woman going to the same job would turn left at the doughnut shop and right at the gas station.
But they'll both get there just as surely, a researcher says.After spending four years running rats and college students through mazes, Thomas Bever concluded that females depend more on landmarks to navigate, while males use a system of vectors - calculating how far and in what direction they travel.
Thus, while men are better at reading maps - a skill that meshes well with their vector-based navigation - the sexes do equally well overall at finding their way around, said Bever, a professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Rochester.
"It's been claimed that males are better navigators than females," he said Tuesday. "We don't find that."
Bever's findings, which have not yet been published, appear to support the work of Christina Williams of Barnard College and Warren Meck of Columbia University, who have linked differences in the way male and female rats navigate to differences in hormone exposure before birth.
They found that when female rats run mazes, they orient themselves in relation to objects in the room such as computers or carts, while male rats rely exclusively on the geometric proportions of the room.
The possibility that men and women navigate the same way as male and female rats is "fascinating," said Dr. Bruce McEwan, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University who specializes in sex differences.
McEwan has found differences in the male and female hippocampus - a part of the brain that has been shown to affect navigation in rats. "I don't know if that could account for differences in behavior, but it's certainly tempting to think that maybe they're related," he said.
Bever said most people, especially women, use both the male and female systems to navigate. The male system is actually more primitive, he said.
"Having a landmark representation is a much smarter way to get around," he said. "Evolution doesn't need us to walk around with blindfolds."