Metacognitive Aspects of Gender Differences in Spatial Navigation

Abstract

Many studies have shown a gender difference in spatial navigation ability, including a related gender difference in global metacognitive self-assessment and spatial anxiety. However, it has yet to be determined whether trial-by-trial metacognitive accuracy differs between the genders and how this may be related to gender differences in navigation performance. The goal of this research was to determine, using the Nelson and Nerens (1990) metamemory framework, if there exist gender differences in trial-by-trial metacognitive monitoring on a first-person virtual maze navigation task, and how this may be related to gender differences in navigation performance. Considering that there is a relatively pervasive stereotype that women have poor navigation stills, an additional goal of this research was to determine if the effects of stereotype could, at least partially, explain the gender difference in navigation performance, confidence, and trial-by-trial metacognitive monitoring accuracy. Many studies have shown stereotype threat and lift to influence confidence and performance between the genders on a variety of spatial cognitive tasks, but mostly on mental rotation tasks. We investigated whether this effect applied to gender differences in a spatial navigation task. In order to accomplish this, we assessed trial-by-trial metacognitive accuracy during a first-person virtual maze navigation task under three stereotype facilitation conditions where participants were told that either: 1) men outperform women on this particular task, 2) women outperform men on this particular task, or 3) the genders perform equally. Over three experiments, the results showed that men generally have more accurate metacognitive monitoring than women, especially when assessing a previous performance. Contrary to our expectations, stereotype activation had no effect on trial-by-trial metacognition, though it did have an effect on navigation performance and confidence.