Citation

Neave N, Hamilton C, Hutton L, Tildesley N, Pickering AT. Hum. Nat. 2005; 16(2): 146-163.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12110-005-1001-8

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A female advantage in object recall is assumed to derive from an adaptation to gathering/foraging. Support for the Gathering Hypothesis has relied upon stimuli and methodologies that lack ecological validity. We report two studies in which object recognition and object location memory were addressed using real plants within naturalistic arrays. In the first, females were significantly quicker than males at finding specific plants in some small arrays, and they made significantly fewer mistakes in a larger array. Next, females also located plants in a large and complex array significantly faster than males. We thus find some support for the Gathering Hypothesis using ecologically valid methods.

Language: en