FACT: MEN ARE BETTER AT FINDING THE WAY THAN WOMEN

A dose of testosterone can help women to navigate better, according to a report published in the journal Behavioral Brain Research. The research also highlights the different areas of the brain used by men and women in wayfinding tasks .

Men and women have different ways of navigating, according to the latest study.

Previous research has shown that in specific spatial tasks, men perform better than women. But it is not clear what role sex hormones play versus cultural conditioning and other factors.

Carl Pintzka, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Department of Neuroscience, and colleagues wanted to investigate whether there are any differences in brain activity when men and women orient themselves.

Using 3D goggles and a joystick, the participants had to orient themselves in a very large virtual maze while images of their brains were continuously recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Men solved 50 % more navigational tasks..(if you have watched the movie MAZE, you will agree with me..lol)

Before the scanning session, the 18 men and 18 women spent an hour learning the layout of the maze.In the scanner, they had 30 seconds to complete each of the 45 navigation tasks, such as "find the yellow car" from different starting points.

RESULT
The men solved 50% more of the tasks than the women.
The scans revealed that the men took shortcuts, oriented themselves more using cardinal directions and used a different part of the brain than the women, suggesting that women and men have different navigational strategies, with men using cardinal directions to a greater degree.

Pintzka concludes that "men's sense of direction was more effective. They quite simply got to their destination faster."