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

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

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 ev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Evolutionary psychological science Vol. 2; no. 2; pp. 84 - 100
Main Authors: Brown, Michael F., Batterman, Jared M., Leman, Joseph, Taylor, Bethany, Kim, Jung, Ruff, Jennie, Saxon, Marie E., Stokesbury, Andrew
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01-06-2016
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Cognition & reasoning
Experiments
Females
Food
Foraging behavior
Gender differences
Hunting
Hypotheses
Males
Memory
Personality and Social Psychology
Psychology
Research Article
Gathering hypothesis
Sex differences
Survival processing
Spatial cognition
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2198-9885
2198-9885
DOI:10.1007/s40806-015-0038-0