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The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task

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...

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Autores principales: Bocchi, Alessia, Palmiero, Massimiliano, Redondo, Jose Manuel Cimadevilla, Tascón, Laura, Nori, Raffaella, Piccardi, Laura
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8224594/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34067401
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11060681
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author Bocchi, Alessia
Palmiero, Massimiliano
Redondo, Jose Manuel Cimadevilla
Tascón, Laura
Nori, Raffaella
Piccardi, Laura
author_facet Bocchi, Alessia
Palmiero, Massimiliano
Redondo, Jose Manuel Cimadevilla
Tascón, Laura
Nori, Raffaella
Piccardi, Laura
author_sort Bocchi, Alessia
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-82245942021-06-25 The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task Bocchi, Alessia Palmiero, Massimiliano Redondo, Jose Manuel Cimadevilla Tascón, Laura Nori, Raffaella Piccardi, Laura Brain Sci Article 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. MDPI 2021-05-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8224594/ /pubmed/34067401 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11060681 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Bocchi, Alessia
Palmiero, Massimiliano
Redondo, Jose Manuel Cimadevilla
Tascón, Laura
Nori, Raffaella
Piccardi, Laura
The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task
title The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task
title_full The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task
title_fullStr The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task
title_full_unstemmed The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task
title_short The Role of Gender and Familiarity in a Modified Version of the Almeria Boxes Room Spatial Task
title_sort role of gender and familiarity in a modified version of the almeria boxes room spatial task
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8224594/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34067401
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11060681
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