The cliché goes that women can’t read maps and get lost all the time. Researchers from Italy have investigated whether this is really true – and have come to a surprising result.
Mar 31, 2026, 3:47 amMar 31, 2026, 3:47 am
Once again, evolution is said to be to blame for the female gender’s poorer ability to orientate itself: men were hunters and had to find their way in the wide world. The women, on the other hand, stayed in the cave with the children. So they didn’t need to be able to orientate themselves outside. But this explanation has long been considered controversial, because today we know that women also went hunting.
Both are equally confused: According to a study, orientation ability has nothing to do with gender. (symbol image)Image: www.imago-images.de
What’s true: Men and women use different strategies to orient themselves. The men rely more on the card strategy. This means that they imagine the surroundings like a map in their head. They remember distances and directions, know where waypoints are and how they relate to each other. This strategy specifically utilizes the hippocampus, an area of the brain that is important for memories and spatial imagery.
Women, on the other hand, tend to use the step-by-step strategy. For example, you remember: “At the red house on the left, then at the tree on the right.” Your focus is on visible features and sequences, rather than an overall overview. The front part of the brain is more active, the prefrontal area, which helps with planning and completing tasks.
Where the women’s strategy fails
However, in familiar surroundings, women’s step-by-step strategy tends to reach its limits. Imagine that a path is unexpectedly blocked due to construction or that you are close and are looking for a shortcut. In such situations, men’s card strategy is more flexible. Therefore, on average, women find it a little more difficult to orientate themselves in familiar environments than men.
Now Judit Fiedler and Alessandro Treves, two neuroscientists from Italy, have shown that as soon as men and women are placed in an unfamiliar environment, these differences disappear. On average, women and men are equally good at orientation. They found this out in an experiment in which 232 adults had to find their way around virtual worlds.
The researchers’ explanation that they in the specialist magazine “Royal Society Open Science” just present: In a completely new environment, familiar clues are missing. Both strategies work worse and everyone has to improvise. As a result, there are just as many women who get along well as men in unknown areas. And just as many men fail as women. (aargauerzeitung.ch)