The current study adopted both overall and fine-grained measures to examine how gender differences in wayfinding are modulated by the type of landmark available in the virtual environment. Two major findings emerged from this investigation: First, the main effects of gender in both overall measures did not converge to reflect the typical superiority of male performance observed in wayfinding tasks. That is, while females spent more time than males in locating targets, both genders were generally equivalent in terms of corrected travel paths. The divergence between the conventional overall measures in the spatial and temporal domains contradicted the close correspondence between these two domains reported in previous studies [62-64]. As already suggested by some researchers, the overall measures, though indicative of overall performance, present a coarse resolution and may miss fine-grained characteristics of wayfinding behavior [53, 65].
Second, the prediction that males would outperform females in the global condition and that females would outperform males in the local condition was only partially confirmed. For the overall measures, both the path and time measures showed landmark type by gender interactions, but the patterns of interaction were different. Regarding the corrected travel path, there was a
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tendency for males to travel longer distances than females in both landmark conditions, but the gender difference was not significant for either type of landmark. In terms of travel duration, males did spend less time than females in both landmark conditions, and the gender difference was larger in the global than in the local condition. Although these results are not entirely consistent with the original prediction, they do partially echo the idea that the superior performance of males is more obvious in the global than in the local landmark condition. Regarding the fine-grained measures, TRaway showed that females spent a smaller proportion of time than males in traveling away from the target location when local landmarks were available, but there was no gender difference when global landmarks were present. Assuming that less time moving away from the target location indicates better performance, this result is consistent with the prediction of female superiority in the local landmark condition, though not with the prediction of male superiority in the global landmark condition. ROTno-translation showed a tendency for females to rotate more angles than males when they made stops, and this gender difference was more prominent in the global than in the local condition. Assuming that less rotation indicates better performance, this result is consistent with the prediction of male superiority in the global landmark condition, though not with the prediction of female superiority in the local landmark condition.
In the following sections, three issues raised in the preceding summary will be discussed in turn: 1) Why did the overall spatial measure diverge from the temporal measure? 2) How do results from the overall and fine-grained measures conjointly form a complete picture of gender differences in wayfinding? 3) How does landmark type moderate gender differences in wayfinding?
5.2.1. Divergence between overall spatial and temporal measures
Two non-exclusive explanations of the divergent results from the overall
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spatial and temporal measures are provided here. The first explanation is not directly related to wayfinding ability per se. The discrepancy between spatial and temporal measures may simply result from the more advanced computer skills of male participants. Coluccia and Louse (2004) suggested that male advantage is dramatically enhanced (males outperforming females in 57 % to 86
% of the experiments reviewed) in VEs when the participants had the opportunity to interact actively with the computerized environment during wayfinding. This is likely due to a higher familiarity with the virtual environment among males because statistically, males play more video games than do females [cf. 47, 66]. We noted that all male participants were enrolled in departments related to engineering, whereas only seven female participants were from those departments. Furthermore, twelve males reported playing video games frequently, whereas only six females reported the same. Because males might already be quite familiar with the computer interface, they may not have much room for improvement in speed. Consistent with this account, a trend in our results (though not remarkable) seems to suggest that wayfinding time improves more from the first half of trials to the second half in females than in males (Figure 13b). Thus, the males’ advantage in time may reflect their superior skills in operating the computer interface, but their familiarity with the computer interface may be independent of their cognitive map, which was more directly reflected by the path measure.
The second explanation of the divergent results is that females and males adopted different strategies when performing the wayfinding task. Females may have adopted a less exploratory strategy than males did; they tended to stay in the same locations to look around rather than continuing to move, as evidenced by their higher TRno-translation and ROTno-translation. By contrast, males preferred to cover a larger area in the virtual environment. A higher proportion of time on the move also led to more changes in orientation while moving (indicated by males’
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higher ROTtranslation). Continuously moving did not make males more effective wayfinders. Based on TRaway, it seems that males spent a slightly higher proportion of time moving away from the target location than did females.
However, given the fact that no dead end existed in the grid-like environment, this strategy increased the males’ chances of finding the target within a shorter amount of time. By monitoring the gaze of participants in a virtual version of the Morris water maze experiment, Mueller et al. [34] demonstrated that females showed initially longer fixation durations and increases in pupil diameter than males did when looking for the path to the hidden platform. Perhaps when finding their way, females require frequent stops to look around and compare the flow of visual scenes with their spatial representations of the environment.
5.2.2. Integrating overall and fine-grained measures of wayfinding performance This latter interpretation of the gender difference integrates results from the fine-grained measures. Numerous studies on wayfinding have adopted overall travel duration [40, 47, 64, 67-68], length of travel path [69], or both [31, 34, 63, 70-71] as an indicator of performance. In this experiment, the overall travel duration indicated a clear male advantage (shorter travel time), similar to the findings of several previous studies in certain contexts of wayfinding [47, 64, 68]. The results of the corrected path measure were also similar to the results of some wayfinding studies [71] that demonstrated no gender difference. The divergence between spatial and temporal measures in the current study suggests that both should be analyzed. Although these measures usually concur, perfect correlation between them is not always guaranteed. The strength of consistency between these two types of measures may depend on the geometric or visual features of the environment or on the idiosyncratic wayfinding strategies adopted by the participants. Merely relying on one type of measure may lead to biased interpretations of the differences between groups or conditions. When the overall measures diverge, researchers must examine information regarding
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metrics at other levels for an accurate interpretation of participant performance [see 53, for comprehensive illustrations].
5.2.3. Influences of landmark types on gender differences
It is also worth noting how wayfinding performance differed between the global and local landmark conditions. As an overall trend, participants traveled longer paths in the local than in the global landmark environment. This was most likely due to the fact that global landmarks could be constantly seen in the mazes and used as visual anchors when computing orientation and heading. By contrast, participants had to move around to search for local landmarks, which made the travel distance longer in the local landmark condition than in the global landmark condition. Analyses of overall measures (Figure 13) also indicated that males benefited more from the presence of global landmarks than did females. Furthermore, it seemed that global landmarks even slowed down female performance. These results are consistent with previous findings that females and males are sensitive to the local and global aspects of the environment, respectively [38, 55-58].
Aside from the global/local landmark processing tendencies of each gender group, a different but not mutually exclusive interpretation based on gender-specific strategies of movement in the VE is also possible. Participants walked away from the target location (TRaway; Figure 14a) and continued moving (TRno-translation, Figure 14b) for longer portions of time under the local than under the global landmark condition. These general differences between global and local landmarks were also mediated by gender and trial blocks. From the significant three-way interaction observed for corrected travel distance and TRaway, we found larger differences between the first and second halves of the trials for the local landmark condition only for males. Males had disproportionately larger travel distances and proportions of time of moving away from targets in the early phase of wayfinding in the environment with local
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landmarks. This can be attributed to the more exploratory wayfinding strategy that males use to reorient themselves in the VE [58], especially at the beginning of the local landmark condition. When navigating the environment with local landmarks, seeing a particular landmark is difficult because it is only visible from certain locations and perspectives. This characteristic may have bolstered the male tendency to continue moving, especially at the beginning of the experiment, when they were still not familiar with the environment.