Sex Differences in Exploration Behavior and the Relationship to Harm Avoidance

Abstract

Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance. Participants explored a novel, large-scale, virtual environment in search of five objects, pointed in the direction of each object from the origin, and then navigated back to the objects. We found that females demonstrated more caution while exploring as reflected in the increased amounts of pausing and revisiting of previously traversed locations. In addition, more pausing and revisiting behaviors led to degradation in navigation performance. Finally, individual levels of trait harm avoidance were positively associated with the amount of revisiting behavior during exploration. These findings support the idea that the fitness costs associated with long-distance travel may encourage females to take a more cautious approach to spatial exploration, and that this caution may partially explain the sex differences in navigation performance.

Age-Related Changes in Spatial Navigation Are Evident by Midlife and Differ by Sex

“…Although there was a sex difference in degrees traveled, with women tending to overshoot and men tending to undershoot, this difference did not affect the overall position error. The tendency to overshoot could be a cautionary measure by women to ensure they reach the start (e.g., Gagnon et al, 2016). In sum, we found little evidence for sex or aging effects in path integration.…”

Divergent Strategies for Learning in Males and Females

“…Male Strategies Were Not More Random Although our regression analyses captured the procession of strategies typically employed as female mice that learned the task, they provided little insight into what the males were doing during early learning. Substantial prior research has found higher impulsive and exploratory behavior in males compared to females, 21,[45][46][47][48] so perhaps males, as a group, lacked a coherent strategy because they simply chose randomly before the reward contingencies were learned. Instead, across several analyses, we found that males' choices depended more on both past outcomes and past choice history than did females'.…”

Childhood wayfinding experience explains sex and individual differences in adult wayfinding strategy and anxiety

“…Like general anxiety, wayfinding anxiety is consistently found to be higher in females than in males (Lawton, 1994(Lawton, , 1996Lawton & Kallai, 2002;Schug, 2016b). Because of real or perceived safety threats, females have a higher tendency than males to behave with caution in order to avoid harm when they go out into the world, which leads them to roam closer to familiar places (e.g., home) when they travel (Gagnon, Cashdan, Stefanucci, & Creem-Regehr, 2016). Females' heightened awareness of threats to their personal safety, then, may increase their worries about navigating novel environments alone (Lawton & Kallai, 2002) and, in turn, may explain reported sex differences in navigation styles and memory for spatial locations (Gagnon et al, 2018).…”