Do Women Really Have Poor Large-scale Spatial Abilities? Gender Differences In A Variety Of Spatial Tasks In Shopping Mall And Office Building

Currently, most researches on gender differences in spatial ability are mostly carried out in virtual environment which does not involved in body movement or in real neutral environment(such as campus, buildings). In addition, the measurement index of traditional spatial ability tests is usually male dominant index, so we argue that these researches can reflect gender differences in real life when they are conducted with different spatial scales, efficiency of spatial activities and environment. Based on the separation of traditional spatial ability test index and daily real activities, in daily life, spatial performance of female could be better than male in special environment like shopping mall. The differences of spatial ability between male and female in both real shopping mall and virtual environment were what we want to test in this study.This study randomly selected 32 students (half male and half female) to participate in the experiment, by letting the subjects finish various tasks in three experimental environments (shopping mall-strange brands floor, shopping mall-familiar brands floor, and a building in Nanjing University). First, subjects go through the path by following a researcher, who would tell them the position of each landmark. And then they would do some spatial tasks, including retrieving path, pointing to the unseen landmarks, distance estimation and pointing to north. When went back to laboratory, they should take part in tasks, including scene recognition, judging relative position (JRD) and sketch maps. After finished all of these tasks, subjects should complete shopping questionnaire and the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale (SBSOD).Experimental results showed that the number of mistakes of female in the three experimental environments was less than that of males, and the performance of the two sexes was almost equal in distance estimation task. Due to the influence of different experimental environments, subjects did the best in building and the worst in shopping mall-strange brands floor, but the performance of the two sexes was almost equal. The performance of female in judging relative position (JRD) was worse than male and the score of female in the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale (SBSOD) was lower than male. Compared with female, male subjects were more accurate and more confident in pointing to north task. The results of scene recognition, pointing task and sketch maps, didn’t show any significant gender differences. Results of shopping questionnaire suggested that compared with male, female were more likely to go to shopping malls and spend more time in shopping, which are consist with results of past researches.Through the investigation of activities in large-scale space environment, this study supports that there are significant gender differences between online and offline tests of survey knowledge. Although there is no difference between male and female in online tasks, female performed worse than male in offline task (JRD). The differences may due to two reasons:spatial abilities or measurements involve in the two representation (online/offline) are different. It is noteworthy that the performance of female was equal even better than male in indoor task (pointing to north), however, men could pointing to north accurately in outdoor environment while women could not. Gender differences in various spatial tasks suggest that subdivision for the large-scale space may be necessary. For a practical point of view, shopping mall did not provide special help for female spatial activities, but in the two different environments, female are able to carry out spatial activities efficiency.