Do sex and menstrual cycle phase change how people navigate and find words?
Men navigated faster and women produced more words, but the menstrual cycle only shifted which navigation strategy women did best with, not their overall performance.
Source
Sex Differences and Menstrual Cycle Dependent Changes in Cognitive Strategies during Spatial Navigation and Verbal Fluency
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Men and naturally cycling women were each tested twice (women in early follicular and mid-luteal phases, order counterbalanced) on a 2-D map navigation task and written verbal fluency tasks whose strategy instructions were manipulated; sex and cycle phase were not manipulated, and salivary hormones were measured.
- N
- N=93 · Students were recruited and tested; after excluding five women whose hormones did not match their reported cycle phase and two men with unstable testosterone, analyses used 49 men and 44 women, each tested in two sessions.
- Population
- Right-handed German-speaking university students at the University of Salzburg aged 18 to 36; women had regular cycles and used no hormonal contraception
- Outcome
- Navigation reaction time and accuracy under allocentric/egocentric and Euclidian/landmark instructions; number of words, cluster size and switches in phonemic and semantic fluency; salivary testosterone, estradiol and progesterone
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What they did
University students did a computer task in which they followed written route descriptions across a grid of landmark symbols, with instructions that used either compass directions or left/right turns, and either distances or landmarks. They also wrote as many words as possible from a letter or category under neutral, 'cluster similar words' or 'switch between subcategories' instructions. Each person was tested twice, with women tested once in the low-hormone early follicular phase and once in the high-hormone mid-luteal phase, confirmed by ovulation tests and saliva hormone levels.
What they found
Men were faster on the navigation task but no more accurate, and women produced more words in both letter and category fluency and switched between subcategories more often. Contrary to the hypotheses, men and women did not differ in which navigation perspective or strategy suited them best. Within women, the luteal phase raised accuracy with landmark instructions and lowered it with distance instructions, and higher progesterone went with better egocentric and worse allocentric accuracy. Cycle phase and hormones had no effect on verbal fluency, and testosterone predicted nothing.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Sex differences are observational, so they cannot be attributed to hormones rather than experience or socialisation. The authors note that egocentric instructions on a fixed on-screen grid also required mental rotation, and that route descriptions had to be remembered, so perspective effects may partly reflect rotation or memory ability rather than strategy preference. Only early follicular and mid-luteal phases were compared, so effects of the late-follicular estradiol peak were not tested, and general intelligence was not measured. All participants were highly educated young students, limiting generalisation.
Key terms
- Allocentric vs. egocentric perspective
- Navigating with fixed external directions such as north and south versus directions relative to your own body such as left and right.
- Euclidian vs. landmark-based strategy
- Using distances and global layout to find a route versus relying on specific objects along the way.
- Phonemic and semantic fluency
- Tasks asking people to produce as many words as possible beginning with a given letter (phonemic) or belonging to a category such as animals (semantic).
- Clustering and switching
- Producing runs of related words within a subcategory versus moving between subcategories; switching is thought to need more cognitive flexibility.
- Follicular and luteal phases
- The first part of the menstrual cycle when estradiol and progesterone are low, and the part after ovulation when both hormones are high.
- Organizational vs. activational hormone effects
- Lasting effects of hormones on brain development versus short-term effects of current hormone levels on behaviour.
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Quiz yourself
What was the main sex difference on the navigation task?
Common questions
If women's navigation strategy changed across the cycle, why didn't their overall performance change?
The luteal phase helped landmark-based accuracy but hurt distance-based accuracy, so gains and losses in different conditions balanced out rather than raising or lowering overall scores.
Why do the authors think sex differences in verbal fluency are not due to current hormone levels?
Neither cycle phase nor measured hormones predicted fluency, so they suggest the female advantage reflects longer-term developmental (organizational) effects instead.
Why were women on hormonal contraception excluded?
Hormonal contraceptives suppress natural cycle-related hormone changes, which would make it impossible to compare low- and high-hormone phases.
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