A CHARACTERIZATION OF PERFORMANCE BY MEN AND WOMEN IN A VIRTUAL MORRIS WATER TASK - A LARGE AND RELIABLE SEX DIFFERENCE

In many mammalian species, it is known that males and females differ i n place learning ability. The performance by men and women is commonly reported to also differ, despite a large amount of variability and am biguity in measuring spatial abilities. In the non-human literature, t he gold standard for measuring place learning ability in mammals is th e Morris water task. This task requires subjects to use the spatial ar rangement of cues outside of a circular pool to swim to a hidden goal platform located in a fixed location. We used a computerized version o f the Morris water task to assess whether this task will generalize in to the human domain and to examine whether sex differences exist in th is domain of topographical learning and memory. Across three separate experiments, varying in attempts to maximize spatial performance, we c onsistently found males navigate to the hidden platform better than fe males across a variety of measures. The effect sizes of these differen ces are some of the largest ever reported and are robust and replicabl e across experiments. These results are the first to demonstrate the e ffectiveness and utility of the virtual Morris water task for humans a nd show a robust sex difference in virtual place learning. (C) 1998 El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.