ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2017
Sex differences in virtual navigation influenced by scale and navigation experience.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- A meta-analysis of sex differences in human navigation skills.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Pooled it
- Virtual Morris Water Task: Procedures and Protocols for the Assessment of Spatial Navigation and Memory.Current protocols · 2026Article
- SPACE: A novel digital tool for assessing hippocampal structural integrity in older adults.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Navigating by Design: Effects of Individual Differences and Navigation Modality on Spatial Memory Acquisition.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Learning the layout of different environments: common or dissociated abilities?Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Individual differences in knowledge network navigation.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Still little evidence sex differences in spatial navigation are evolutionary adaptations.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Motivation moderates gender differences in navigation performance.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Paving the way to better understand the effects of prolonged spaceflight on operational performance and its neural bases.NPJ microgravity · 2023Review
- Navigational Experience and the Preservation of Spatial Abilities into Old Age Among a Tropical Forager-Farmer Population.Topics in cognitive science · 2023Article
- Temporal and spatial contiguity are necessary for competition between events.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2022Article
- Exploring the Spatial Relationships Between Real and Virtual Experiences: What Transfers and What Doesn't.Frontiers in virtual reality · 2020Article
- The role of perception and action on the use of allocentric information in a large-scale virtual environment.Experimental brain research · 2020Article
- Cultural differences in room size perception.PloS one · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Morris water maze is a spatial abilities test adapted from the animal spatial cognition literature and has been studied in the context of sex differences in humans. This is because its standard design, which manipulates proximal (close) and distal (far) cues, applies to human navigation. However, virtual Morris water mazes test navigation skills on a scale that is vastly smaller than natural human navigation. Many researchers have argued that navigating in large and small scales is fundamentally different, and small-scale navigation might not simulate natural human navigation. Other work has suggested that navigation experience could influence spatial skills. To address the question of how individual differences influence navigational abilities in differently scaled environments, we employed both a large- (146.4 m in diameter) and a traditional- (36.6 m in diameter) scaled virtual Morris water maze along with a novel measure of navigation experience (lifetime mobility). We found sex differences on the small maze in the distal cue condition only, but in both cue-conditions on the large maze. Also, individual differences in navigation experience modulated navigation performance on the virtual water maze, showing that higher mobility was related to better performance with proximal cues for only females on the small maze, but for both males and females on the large maze.
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Registered trials
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