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The Female Advantage in Object Location Memory According to the Foraging Hypothesis: A Critical Analysis

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Abstract

According to the evolutionary hypothesis of Silverman and Eals (1992, Sex differences in spatial abilities: Evolutionary theory and data. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 533–549). Oxford: Oxford University Press), women evolutionary hypothesis, women surpass men in object location memory as a result of a sexual division in foraging activities among early humans. After surveying the main anthropological information on ancestral sex-related foraging, we review the evidence on how robust women’s advantage in object location memory is. This leads us to suggest that the functional understanding of this type of memory would benefit from comparing men and women in carefully designed and ecologically meaningful cognitive contexts involving, for instance, incidental versus intentional settings that call for either the absolute or relative encoding of the locations of common versus uncommon objects.

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Notes

  1. According to Tooby and DeVore (1987), other uniquely human features include the systematic use of stone tools, the intensity of paternal investment and male cooperative behaviors, and the penetration of temperate and even periglacial habitats.

  2. There has indeed been much discussion in paleoanthropology over the past 25 years as to when and the extent to which our ancestors—such as H. habilis and H. rudolfensis more than 2 million years ago, as well as H. erectus, H. neandertalensis, and early H. sapiens, throughout the Pleistocene—engaged in hunting and/or scavenging.

  3. However, early meat procurement through scavenging has been supported by sophisticated analyses of Plio-Pleistocene faunal remains (for reviews, see Bunn and Ezzo 1993, and O’Connell et al. 2002). These findings have led some authors (e.g., Blumenschine 1991; O’Connell et al. 2002; Shipman 1986) to suggest that hominids scavenged carnivore kills on a relatively large scale; others (e.g., Potts 1988; Sept 1992) have expressed reservations with regard to inferring the extent of this practice. Additional references of a homologous nature show that meat acquisition through both hunting and occasional scavenging is practiced among extant African hunter-gatherers, who are highly skilled and equipped with efficient weapons (Bunn et al. 1988; Isaac and Crader 1981; O’Connell et al. 1988). Clearly, the hunting-scavenging debate is far from settled (for reviews, see Lewis 1997; Rose and Marshall 1996; Stanford and Bunn 1999). Moreover, existing evidence may not permit its resolution (Klein 2000).

  4. However, recent analyses of plant remains on the working edges of stone tools have suggested that rudimentary wooden spears may have been fabricated 1.5 million years ago (Dominguez-Rodrigo et al. 2001). Interestingly, a series of wooden spears has been dated to 400,000 years ago (Thieme 1997)—that is, antecedent to the emergence of H. neandertalensis and H. sapiens.

  5. Thus, participation restricted to animal tracking and stalking is not considered. However, that women possess extensive knowledge of animal behavior within specific environments and are highly capable of interpreting complex signs of game presence is not disputed. Such a crucial expertise has, for example, been substantiated among the Ju/’hoansi-!Kung from Namibia (Biesele and Barclay 2001) and the Chipewyan from Canada (Jarvenpa and Brumbach 1995). In addition, our definition obviously excludes women’s contribution to successful hunting at the level of cultural representations. For instance, among the Iñupiat from Alaska, hunting is conceived as a sacred activity in which, because of their generosity, women succeed in attracting the animals, which then readily give themselves to the men who perform the killing (Bodenhorn 1990).

  6. These data were obtained among Agta from the Cagayan province, a group with high pre- and post-partum infant mortality. Estioko-Griffin and Griffin (1985) do not, however, directly relate this to women engaging in hunting. Supporting this position is the finding that there was no significant difference in the number of living offspring between Cagayan women who hunt and those who do not (Goodman et al. 1985). By contrast, and in keeping with an evolutionary perspective, Hurtado et al. (1985) have suggested that high infant mortality could constitute one of the costs of hunting by Cagayan women. However, they have put forward the idea that, because the amount of meat procured by Cagayan men may be insufficient to meet the nutritional needs of the entire group, women may hunt to avoid a further decrease in reproductive success for both sexes. Such presumed benefit is indeed congruent with an even higher infant mortality in the Palanan and Casiguran provinces, where very few Agta women hunt (Kelly 1995). It thus appears that, under the particular socioecological conditions prevailing in the Cagayan province, fulfilling food requirements through both men and women relying heavily on hunting the relatively abundant game (Goodman et al. 1985), as well as investing only weakly in the gathering of scarce edible plant food (Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981), may have contributed to the preservation of a reasonable level of reproductive success.

  7. Several of these objects are not easily identifiable. Epting and Overman (1998) have later reported that some objects looked like tools or car-engine parts to a portion of their sample.

  8. With a purpose somewhat different from ours, that of quantifying the magnitude of sex effects in object location memory tests, Voyer et al. (2005) have recently carried out a meta-analysis that has uncovered a rather moderate female superiority.

  9. Under both incidental (Table 2) and intentional (Table 3) encoding, Lewin et al. (2001) failed to find a significant gender difference after having employed uncommon objects and the paper-and-pencil format. They have acknowledged the possibility of a floor effect due to the difficulty in assigning verbal labels to the complex configurations of the inkblots involved.

  10. The objects were shown in a random order, identical for each participant (A. M. C. Barnfield, personal communication, November 16, 1999).

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Acknowledgements

During her graduate studies at the Université de Montréal, Isabelle Ecuyer-Dab was supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the Université de Montréal.

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Correspondence to Isabelle Ecuyer-Dab.

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A preliminary version of this work was part of a doctoral dissertation on the evolution of sex differences in spatial abilities by the first author under the supervision of the second author.

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Ecuyer-Dab, I., Robert, M. The Female Advantage in Object Location Memory According to the Foraging Hypothesis: A Critical Analysis. Hum Nat 18, 365–385 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-007-9022-0

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