During spatial navigation, women typically navigate an environment using a landmark strategy, whereas men typically use an orientation strategy. To examine the as yet unknown effects of sexual orientation on these normative sex differences, this study required 80 healthy heterosexual and homosexual adult men and women to provide directions from experimental maps for 4 routes. The frequency and type of strategy used by each participant were computed. Expected sex differences were demonstrated, and a robust cross-sex shift was shown by homosexual men in using landmarks. This remained after controlling for differences in mental rotation, directional sense, and general intelligence. The findings may limit the number of putative neurodevelopmental pathways responsible for sex differences in navigation strategy utility.

The fate of the unattended message in dichotic listening experiments is a much disputed issue. Moray (1969) proposes that there is no processing of the unattended message, whereas Norman (1969) has suggested that it is analyzed to the level of meaning. In order to test these alternative hypotheses an experiment was performed in which galvanic skin responses (GSR) were conditioned to a word (CS) by pairing it with shock. The word was then included in passages of prose presented to subjects as the attended and unattended messages in a dichotic listening task. GSR's were obtained to the occurrence of CS in the unattended message and also to words acoustically similar to CS and to synonyms of CS. The probability of obtaining a GSR to the occurrence of an accoustically similar word was increased by placing that word in a context appropriate to CS. These results suggest that the unattended message can be processed to a level at which semantic information is extracted without the subject's reported awareness.

Previous studies by Govier and colleagues have shown dichotic listening performance to be related to occupation. The results of these studies were interpreted as supporting the view that both occupational choice and dichotic listening asymmetries depend upon biologically determined aspects of brain organization. The present study sought to test further the link between occupation and cognition by investigating the patterns of spatial and verbal abilities in males and females in male-dominated occupations and males and females in female-dominated occupations. It was hypothesized that occupational choice would be a salient marker for within-sex variation on cognitive tasks previously shown to differentiate performance in men and women. The results supported the hypothesis, and are interpreted as strengthening the view that occupational choice is, at least in part, a function of an individual's cognitive organization.

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This paper sets out the events that led to the development of the hypothesis that brains are sexed and that this, at least in part, underlies the sex differentiation that is observed across the range of occupations. It is also suggested that an individual's brainsex is a powerful organising influence on his or her pattern of abilities, emotional life, motives, and interests. It therefore follows that choice of occupation is an indicator of an individual's essential psychological character. The roll played by chance factors in the evolution of the ideas presented here is highlighted.