Which Way Did We Go?

Psychologist MaryAnn Baenninger once took a few rides on the New York City subway with her husband. Each time they emerged from a station, and Baenninger looked around for street signs to get her bearings, she noticed that her husband knew exactly where they were. When she asked him how he always knew their location, he explained that he kept track of which direction they were heading-from the moment they entered the subway-and modified his orientation with each turn. Baenninger realized that as her husband had been updating directions, she had been reading advertisements on the train's walls and watching other passengers. When she tried his technique, she found that when they exited a station, she also knew where they were.

For several years, Baenninger, an associate professor at The College of New Jersey, had been studying how women and men differ in their spatial abilities. The subway experience made her ask whether women, who are often stereotyped as understanding direction less well than men, might simply pay less attention to direction-just as she had. She wondered whether people could acquire a better sense of direction through learning.

To find out, Baenninger and Kersten Elenteny, an undergraduate student, set up an experiment. At a nearby community college, they gathered 120 students who had never been to The College of New Jersey's campus. The students took a campus tour, which eventually led them to a new music building. Just before entering the music building, a tour guide pointed out Green Hall--a rather conspicuous administration building with a tower clock that rings hourly. Then the students took a winding tour through the music building. Baenninger says the tour 'had no rhyme or reason, but was consistent for each participant. We were really trying to get them as mixed up as we could.' When the tour reached a room without windows in the building's basement, the tour guide instructed each student to point an arrow at the location of Green Hall. The men pointed much more accurately than the women. On average, the men came within 20 degrees of locating Green Hall. The women, on average, missed by about 60 degrees.

From those results, one might conclude that men can 'feel' direction better than women. Maybe men even possess a special direction circuit in their brains. Or, as Baenninger thought, the women might not be paying much attention to direction. In an attempt to motivate the students to keep track of directions, Baenninger and Elenteny tried the same experiment but encouraged all the students to remember the location of Green Hall. With that change, the women improved dramatically in pointing out Green Hall, getting within 15 degrees on average, and pointed just as accurately as the men.

'I think there are biologically based differences between men and women's directional sense,' Baenninger said, 'but I think that a greater amount of variability between men's and women's performances--particularly for everyday spatial tasks--is accounted for by experimental and motivational factors.' Men, that is, learn to pay attention to direction more than women.

Baenninger and Elenteny also tried one more twist--giving the students a floorplan of the music building. The students received the floorplan in one of three ways: Some saw the floorplan at the end of the tour to point out the building's internal structure, some saw the floorplan briefly before entering the building and some carried the floorplan with them throughout the music-building tour. Just seeing the floorplan at the end of the study improved the women's accuracy in pointing out Green Hall. They did even better when they saw the floorplan before entering the building. And they did the best when they could carry the floorplan throughout the tour, presumably helping them keep track of where they were heading. For the men, though, the floorplan made no difference--regardless of when, where or for how long they saw it. So on your list of male stereotypes, just after the one about men never asking for directions, you might add that most men don't read maps.

We do lack some of the special navigational capabilities that lead other animals from place to place. Nevertheless, we get around just fine by using a map--either on paper or in our mind--to keep track of every twist and turn.

Mike May