“…This effect was independent of both environment and trial type, signifying that regardless of condition, women were less efficient at navigating to their target than were men. This result is consistent with studies of gender differences in spatial ability, which commonly report a male advantage on small-scale tests of mental rotation (Linn & Petersen, 1985;Masters & Sanders, 1993;Voyer et al, 1995) and visuospatial working memory (Hegarty et al, 2006;Shah & Miyake, 1996), and on tests of learning in virtual (Liu et al, 2011;Moffat et al, 1998;Sandstrom, Kaufman, & Huettel, 1998) and real environments. Women also drew less accurate maps than did men, suggesting that performance on the wayfinding task was facilitated by having an accurate topological representation of places within the environment (i.e., cognitive map).…”