During a discussion with friends or a dispute in the car with his half on the road to vacation, who has never heard of the supposed predominance masculine on the sense of orientation? Experiments have been carried out to try to determine a physiological cause aimed at confirming or invalidating this hypothesis.
The stereotype of the "female deficit in the sense of orientation" would have an unconscious impact on behavior . As a result, women would act in this direction so as not to derogate from public opinion. Moreover, during a study conducted by French specialists, women knowing in advance the purpose of this evaluation saw their performance diminished.
"The simple fact of being evaluated in a domain for which their group is decked out with a negative stereotype thus seems to cause a lower performance in the domain in question. While continuing to understand the processes underlying these effects, future research should focus on strategies to counter stereotype threat effects », say the specialists.
Research follows the trail of the male sex hormone:testosterone. A university in Norway carried out an experiment in 2016 involving a panel of about forty adult women up to thirty years old, half of whom had received a dose of testosterone with the aim of making them memorize a route using 3D glasses.
"The testosterone group had better representation of directions in the environment and performed significantly better on the mental rotation task compared to the placebo group,but navigation success and navigation strategy were similar in both groups “, explain the scientists of this study.
Result:Testosterone has negligible effect on all spatial recognition.
According to a study led by a team from the University of Toronto, playing action video games promotes mental rotation , this ability to mentally rotate places or objects. Many women are into it today as well, which balances the balance of virtually playful learning of landmarks with men.
"After only ten hours of training with an action video game, subjects achieved substantial gains in spatial attention and mental spin , with women benefiting more than men. Control subjects who played a game without action showed no improvement conclude the researchers.
Another guess has to do with prehistoric instinct rooted in our genes. The man had to increase his ability to find his way around his environment to track down and bring back his prey, while the woman did not necessarily need it for her own tasks.
What we can say today is that no degree of orientation ability would be determined by the difference between male and female . This would actually come from the practice of daily travel in our environment. However, some people live completely devoid of this sense and adopt very particular methods of following a route.
