A putative male advantage in wayfinding ability is the most widely documented sex difference in human cognition and has also been observed in other animals. The common interpretation, the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis, posits that this male advantage evolved as an adaptive response to sex differences in home range size. A previous study a decade ago tested this hypothesis by comparing sex differences in home range size and spatial ability among 11 species and found no relationship. However, the study was limited by the small sample size, the lack of species with a larger female home range and the lack of non-Western human data. The present study represents an update that addresses all of these limitations, including data from 10 more species and from human subsistence cultures. Consistent with the previous result, we found little evidence that sex differences in spatial navigation and home range size are related. We conclude that sex differences in spatial ability are more likely due to experiential factors and/or unselected biological side effects, rather than functional outcomes of natural selection.

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In the absence of sexually antagonistic selection, the most likely explanation for sex differences in cognitive performance in humans in Western cultures has always been that, from an early age, males and females are socialized in sex-specific ways that entail differential engagement in activities related to spatial cognition. We will hereafter refer to this alternative hypothesis as phenotypic plasticity, consistent with the general usage of this term (e.g. [35]). Thus, men may perform slightly better on average than women on spatial navigation-related tasks because, on average, they are more experienced in similar tasks. This is consistent with the undeniable fact that performance is trainable, and experience leads to better performance."