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Cultural Change Reduces Gender Differences in Mobility and Spatial Ability among Seminomadic Pastoralist-Forager Children in Northern Namibia

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Abstract

A fundamental cognitive function found across a wide range of species and necessary for survival is the ability to navigate complex environments. It has been suggested that mobility may play an important role in the development of spatial skills. Despite evolutionary arguments offering logical explanations for why sex/gender differences in spatial abilities and mobility might exist, thus far there has been limited sampling from nonindustrialized and subsistence-based societies. This lack of sampling diversity has left many unanswered questions regarding the effects that environmental variation and cultural norms may have in shaping mobility patterns during childhood and the development of spatial competencies that may be associated with it. Here we examine variation in mobility (through GPS tracking and interviews), performance on large-scale spatial skills (i.e., navigational ability), and performance on small-scale spatial skills (e.g., mental rotation task, Corsi blocks task, and water-level task) among Twa forager/pastoralist children whose daily lives have been dramatically altered since settlement and the introduction of government-funded boarding schools. Unlike in previous findings among Twa adults, boys and girls (N = 88; aged 6–18) show similar patterns of travel on all measures of mobility. We also find no significant differences in spatial task performance by gender for large- or small-scale spatial skills. Further, children performed as well as adults did on mental rotation, and they outperformed adults on the water-level task. We discuss how children’s early learning environments may influence the development of both large- and small-scale spatial skills.

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  1. Some studies have found a gender difference in mental rotation (or its precursors) in preschoolers and even infancy (Levine et al. 1999; Moore and Johnson 2011; Quinn and Liben 2014), although preschoolers often fail at this task (Frick et al. 2013, 2014).

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Acknowledgments

We thank John Jakurama for his continued assistance on the project. We also thank the members of the University of Utah’s Spatial Cognition and Navigation (SCAN) Project for invaluable insight and feedback, as well as Phoebe McNeally and the DIGIT lab for assistance with GIS data. Finally, we would like to thank Layne Vashro, Chelsea Leonard, Ronelle and Lorens Rademeyer, and Jason Leiser for logistical support throughout the duration of this study. This study was funded by NSF grant BCS 1628583.

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All analyses, figures, and tables were conducted in R-3.6.2 and LaTeX2e. Code is available upon request.

Funding

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation NSF (BCS 1628583).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Helen E. Davis

  2. One Pencil Project, 501(c)(3), Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Jonathan Stack

  3. Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112, USA

    Elizabeth Cashdan

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  1. Helen E. Davis
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EC designed research; JS and HD performed research; HD analyzed data; HD and EC wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Helen E. Davis.

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Davis, H.E., Stack, J. & Cashdan, E. Cultural Change Reduces Gender Differences in Mobility and Spatial Ability among Seminomadic Pastoralist-Forager Children in Northern Namibia. Hum Nat 32, 178–206 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09388-7

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