Bocchi Alessia, Palmiero Massimiliano, Redondo Jose Manuel Cimadevilla, Tascón Laura, Nori Raffaella, Piccardi Laura
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy.
Biotechnological and Applied Clinical Sciences, University of L'Aquila, 67100 L'Aquila, Italy.
Brain Sci. 2021 May 22;11(6):681. doi: 10.3390/brainsci11060681.
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.
性别和熟悉程度等个体因素会影响一个人在空间导航过程中获得的环境表征类型。男性似乎更喜欢依赖类似地图的概览表征，而女性则更喜欢使用顺序路线表征。此外，对环境的熟悉程度越高，环境表征就越完整。本研究旨在调查在两种不同的物体位置学习任务（即阿尔梅里亚盒子任务）中，假设采用路线或概览视角，并考虑环境熟悉程度的作用时的性别差异。两组参与者必须学习放置在虚拟房间中的盒子的位置。参与者进行了多次试验，以便增加对环境的熟悉程度。在这两项任务中，都发现了性别和熟悉程度的影响，并且只有在路线视角下才出现了交互作用。这表明无论采用何种视角都能发现性别差异，在导航任务中男性表现优于女性。然而，在路线任务中，性别差异仅出现在学习的初始阶段，即环境未被探索时，而当对环境的熟悉程度增加时就消失了。这与研究结果一致，即熟悉程度可以减轻空间任务中的性别差异，尤其是在更复杂的任务中。
