Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Popular sources often assume the existence of a male advantage in navigation, but the scientific data are inconsistent. This meta-analysis evaluates the literature on behavioral sex differences in human navigation. We quantify the overall magnitude of sex differences in a variety of paradigms and populations and examine potential moderators in large-scale navigation skills, using 694 effect sizes from 266 studies and a multilevel linear modeling approach. Overall, we found that male participants outperform female participants, with a small to medium effect size (d= 0.34 to 0.38). The type of task, the type of dependent variable and the testing environment significantly contribute to variability in effect sizes. Pointing and recall tasks show larger sex differences than distance estimation tasks or learning to criterion; among the dependent variables, the deviation scores associated with pointing tasks show larger effect sizes. The largest estimate was d = .55 for tasks than required coordinating indoor and outdoor views. Interestingly, studies with children younger than 13 years showed very small effect sizes (d = .15) as compared to older age groups. We discuss the implications of these findings for the study of sex differences and identify avenues for future navigation research.