Superior Spatial Memory of Women: Stronger Evidence for the Gathering Hypothesis

Male and female college students played the commercial game Memory TM, which required them to recall the location of previously viewed items, and also completed a 20item mental rotation task. As is typical, males performed better than females (d = .67) on the mental rotation task. In contrast, females outperformed males by a large margin (d = .89) on the memory task. Performance on the two tasks was correlated for females, but not for males. The reversal of sex differences between tasks suggests that spatial ability is not a unitary trait and that different kinds of spatial processing may have been important for males and females in the EEA (environment of evolutionary adoptedness). The Memory TM game appears to mimic the cognitive demands of foraging better than previous spatial memory tasks. © Elsevier Science Inc., 1997