(Press-News.org) Milan, Italy, 30 June 2011 – Differences in male and female behaviour are often subject to study. Women are known to be more verbally fluent, have better manual dexterity and are better at noticing things (like a new haircut). Men on the other hand often take less time parking their cars and have less trouble than women in navigating in a new city. The latter capacities, in which men tend to excel, are known as visuo-spatial abilities. A new study has demonstrated that men have a similar advantage in their hearing. The findings are published in the June 2011 issue of Elsevier's Cortex.
Ida Zündorf from the Center of Neurology at Tübingen University, together with Prof. Hans-Otto Karnath and Dr. Jörg Lewald, investigated the audio-spatial abilities in healthy men and women by means of a sound-localization task. Participants were asked to listen to sounds and determine the location of the sound source, either by pointing towards it or by naming the exact position (e.g. 45 degrees left). At first, sounds were presented one at a time and both men and women accomplished the task with great accuracy. Later, several sounds were presented simultaneously and participants had to focus on and localize only one sound. This is known as the cocktail party phenomenon – the human capacity to detect and focus on one particular sound source in a noisy environment. Interestingly, women found the second task much more difficult, compared to men, to the extent that in some cases they even thought the sounds were coming from the opposite direction.
These results suggest that men are not only better at visuo-spatial tasks, but also in auditory-spatial tasks. Since this male advantage was only found in the cocktail party situation, i.e. women performed equally well when sounds were presented one at a time, this indicates that the difference is related to a "high attentional mechanism" in the brain specifically involved in extracting spatial information of one particular sound source in a noisy environment. It has been speculated that men have developed these spatial abilities as the result of natural and sexual selection throughout human evolution.
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Notes to Editors:
The article is "Male advantage in sound localization at cocktail parties" by Ida C. Zündorf, Hans-Otto Karnath and Jörg Lewald, and appears in Cortex, Volume 47, Issue 6 (June 2011), published by Elsevier in Italy. Full text of the article featured above is available to members of the media upon request. Please contact the Elsevier press office, newsroom@elsevier.com. To schedule an interview, contact Prof. Hans-Otto Karnath, Karnath@uni-tuebingen.de, or Dr Ida Zündorf, ida.zuendorf@medizin.uni-tuebingen.de.
About Cortex
Cortex is an international journal devoted to the study of cognition and of the relationship between the nervous system and mental processes, particularly as these are reflected in the behaviour of patients with acquired brain lesions, normal volunteers, children with typical and atypical development, and in the activation of brain regions and systems as recorded by functional neuroimaging techniques. It was founded in 1964 by Ennio De Renzi. The Editor in-chief of Cortex is Sergio Della Sala, Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. Fax: 0131 6513230, e-mail: cortex@ed.ac.uk. Cortex is available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00109452.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.
A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).
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