Sorry ladies, males really are better at navigating! Study confirms boys give more accurate directions than girls from age 3
- Psychologists tested the ability of boys and girls to give accurate directions
- READ MORE: Women are better at finding and remembering words than men
If you're particularly bad at navigating from the passenger seat, you're not alone.
But a new study suggests this may be more of a female trait than a male one.
Psychologists in New Jersey have found that boys aged 3 to 10 years old give better directions than girls of the same age.
While navigating a computer-generated route, the males gave more accurate verbal instructions to a friend, the experiments showed.
Although the study specifically focused on juveniles, the findings may provide a glimpse of sex-based navigational differences that continue until adulthood.
The study found boys give more helpful and accurate directions than females - suggesting males have better spatial abilities
The new study has been led by researchers at Montclair State University in New Jersey and published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Lead author Yingying Yang said there are various theories as to why boys give more accurate directions.
'These range from biological (e.g., testosterone), to experience-based (e.g., boys have more experience in independent travelling) and parenting practices (e.g., boys are allowed further away from home than girls are),' she told MailOnline.
'Our study does not directly test any theory about why it happened, unfortunately.'
For their online experiment conducted over Zoom, the researchers recruited 141 volunteers aged between 3 and 10 – 78 boys and 63 girls.
Using a computer programme, the children were tasked with describing a route, both from a bird's eye perspective ('map') and a first-person perspective that gradually moved along the corridors of a 'maze'.
Dotted along the route were 'landmarks' – little computer-game-style objects including a mango, a teddy bear, a monkey and a bowl of cherries.
Using a computer programme, the children were tasked with describing a route, both from a bird's eye perspective ('map', A-D) and a first-person perspective ('maze', E)
In both settings, they had to guide a computer-generated friend called 'Mr Birdie' – who was blindfolded and could not see – through the route using verbal directions.
Researchers scored the children's directions based on how well they used helpful directional terms (e.g. left and right) and landmarks (monkey, cherries) to describe the routes.
Results showed that boys were generally better at giving correct direction words (e.g. 'turn left') and were less inclined to give vague directions '(that way').
Later in the experiments, researchers asked the children to recall the directions along the route from just their own memory.
But in this case the academics found that boys and girls performed similarly – suggesting both are as adept at remembering routes.
Overall boys were more accurate in describing routes than girls, as shown on this graph - but boys and girls were about as good as each other at recalling the route
Interestingly, better directions were given in the map condition than the first-person maze condition overall, researchers also found.
This suggests that maps are indeed a better way to get children to learn a route than actually physically taking them along that route.
'To enhance children’s direction giving, it may be more useful to teach children to use maps than to be exposed to a route,' the team say.
Their findings may have implications for understanding individual differences in navigation in children and may also help to close the gender gap, especially in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths).
One limitatin of the study is that the team did not able to code hand gestures and analysis was limited to verbal utterances alone.
A 2018 study found that when asked to give directions, gestures accompanied about 30 per cent of verbal phrases for both young children and adults.
