women showed more agreement among themselves about the classification of these species, showed greater complexity in their overall classification system, and had more nuanced knowledge about individual species.Read more at location 7720
In a study of the Paniya and Kuruma tribes in India, Cruz García (2006) found that mothers were more knowledgeable of local plants than fathers and passed this folk biological knowledge to their children; children also learn from other adults and from peers (Setalaphruk & Price, 2007).Read more at location 7722
Bay region of Brazil, women showed greater knowledge of medicinal plants than did men.Read more at location 7727
Given men’s greater participation in hunting in traditional societies, it is not surprising that they have more complex knowledge of local fauna than do women.Read more at location 7743
In support of the predicted developmental sex difference, there is some indication that boys attend to potentially dangerous and wild animals more often than do girls and know more about these animals (Blurton Jones, Hawkes, & O’Connell, 1997; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Setalaphruk & Price, 2007).Read more at location 7751
For normal adults, McKenna and Parry (1994) found that women were better at naming fruits and vegetables and men were better at naming animals, but other studies have not found this sex difference (Barbarotto et al., 2002); men are better at naming tools, however (see the section titled Tool Use later in this chapter).Read more at location 7779
At this point, scientists do not know enough to draw firm conclusions about the origin of the sex differences in folk biological competencies.Read more at location 7798
explanation is less likely for sex differences that have emerged in modern societies,Read more at location 7801
suspect the differences arise from the combination of sex differences inherent in attentional and interest biases and corresponding sex differences in engagement with the biological world. The tendency of boys to attend to wild and potentially dangerous animals more frequently than girls might reflect such an attentional bias, and their play hunting, a corresponding activity that would eventually result in a sex difference favoring men, might result in knowledge of local fauna (Blurton Jones et al., 1997; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989).Read more at location 7802
I return to G. M. Alexander’s (2003) hypothesis about the development of the where as contrasted with the what stream of the visual system (see the section titled Infancy, chap. 10, this volume), specifically, that prenatal and early postnatal exposure to testosterone may enhance aspects of the development and functioning of the where system and result in a sex difference favoring boys in interest in object motion.Read more at location 7814
sex differences in the detection of objects obscured in a complex visual scene, detecting and tracking the movement of objects in physical space, and skill at behaviorally reacting to these moving objects (Law et al., 1993; Peters, 1997; Schiff & Oldak, 1990).Read more at location 7818
Men show several advantages in the visual system, even though women have more sensitive sensory systems in the areas of touch, smell, taste, and some aspects of hearingRead more at location 7823
About 8% of men have varying degrees of color blindness, that is, they are poor at discriminating colors in the red–green spectrum; about 2% of men cannot discriminate red from green at all (Nathans, Piantanida, Eddy, Shows, & Hogness, 1986). Discrimination of red from green appears to be an evolved feature of the primate visual system that supports the detection of fruit and other colorful foods (Shyue et al., 1995), and thus these men should be at an evolutionary disadvantage.Read more at location 7832
Men also show advantages in the ability to judge the velocity and trajectory of a moving object, generate visual images of a moving object, estimate when an object moving directly toward them will hit them, and hit a moving object with a thrown projectile (Pavio & Clark, 1991; Schiff & Oldak, 1990).Read more at location 7844
As I mentioned in chapter 10 of this volume (in the section titled Physical Competencies), boys and men have a very large advantage over same-age girls and women in throwing distance, velocity, and accuracy (Thomas & French, 1985).Read more at location 7860
differences in the ability to form mental representations (e.g., images of the local ecology) of and to remember this environment.Read more at location 7914
Men typically outperform women on tests that involve the representation and mental rotation of images in three-dimensional space (see Figure 13.2), and women outperform men on some memory tasksRead more at location 7916
When asked to generate a map after exploring a novel environment, boys’ maps showed more accurate clustering of environmental features and more accurate representations of the geometric relations—cardinal direction (e.g., Building A is northwest of Building B)—among these features (Matthews, 1992).Read more at location 7940
Boys and girls also differed in the extent to which they focused on landmarks (e.g., specific buildings) or routes (e.g., roadways) in their maps. In this study and others, girls have been found to attend more to landmarks and relative direction (Building A is left of Building B) and boys to routes and cardinal direction (see also J. Choi & Silverman, 2003).Read more at location 7942
Boys’ and men’s advantages in the ability to generate representations of novel environments and to mentally manipulate three-dimensional images stand in sharp contrast to girls’ and women’s advantages in certain forms of visuospatial memory (Eals & Silverman, 1994; T. W. James & Kimura, 1997).Read more at location 7973
tool construction is much more common among men than women across traditional societies (Daly & Wilson, 1983; Murdock, 1981); boys have a better intuitive sense of how to use objects as tools and learn how to use tools more quickly than do girls (Z. Chen & Siegler, 2000; Gredlein & Bjorklund, 2005);Read more at location 8147
