Abstract
A female advantage in object recall is assumed to derive from an adaptation to gathering/foraging. Support for the Gathering Hypothesis has relied upon stimuli and methodologies that lack ecological validity. We report two studies in which object recognition and object location memory were addressed using real plants within naturalistic arrays. In the first, females were significantly quicker than males at finding specific plants in some small arrays, and they made significantly fewer mistakes in a larger array. Next, females also located plants in a large and complex array significantly faster than males. We thus find some support for the Gathering Hypothesis using ecologically valid methods.
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Nick Neave (Ph.D.) is a senior lecturer in evolutionary psychology and hormones and behavior at Northumbria University. His research includes the relationship between hormones and physical/behavioral characteristics, and sex differences in spatial ability. Colin Hamilton (Ph.D.) is a senior lecturer in cognitive psychology at Northumbria University. His research interests include visuospatial working memory and sex differences. Anne Pickering (Ph.D.) is a botanist. Nicola Tildesley and Lee Hutton were research assistants at the time of the testing.
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Neave, N., Hamilton, C., Hutton, L. et al. Some evidence of a female advantage in object location memory using ecologically valid stimuli. Hum Nat 16, 146–163 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-005-1001-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-005-1001-8