No Evidence for Effects of Fitness Relevance or Sex Differences in a Virtual Hunting and Gathering Task

Abstract

A computerized task could be completed by predicting the location of a moving target or by choosing several stationary targets. In a fitness-relevant condition, this task was presented to participants in terms of hunting and gathering food necessary for survival. In four experiments, there was no evidence that male and female participants differed in terms of their tendency to complete the task in these two ways. In three of the experiments, performance in the fitness-relevant condition was compared to performance in a control condition in which the task was presented as a computer game with no reference to hunting or gathering. No evidence for an effect of fitness relevance was found. These results challenge the idea that sex differences in spatial cognition are related to the sexual differentiation of foraging behavior during human history. They also suggest limitations on the role of fitness-relevant processing of information ("survival processing") on cognitive performance.