>2008/7/11 Julian Rohrhuber
><<mailto:rohrhuber_at_uni-hamburg.de>rohrhuber_at_uni-hamburg.de>:
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>It might be interesting to see if or how this differs between the
>sexes. According to some research (most) men navigate by
>internalising a model of the terrain while (most) women supposedly
>use a series of linked relationships between places.
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>An honest question: Why do you find it interesting as a consequence of gender?
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>It's not the gender element I'm after here as such. It's just that I
>know for certain that is a field where research has been done on how
>people differ in using spatial reasoning. Likely there are many more
>differences that vary according to many factors but I have no idea
>to what degree that has been researched. Surroundings and gender are
>both relatively easy to check for which is probably what those
>researchers thought as well in a hard field to do research at all
>like that.
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>I should have been more clear that I was using gender and internal
>representation of surroundings as a example and not as a topic on
>itself. I would still be interested to hear whether those
>differences in that type of visualisation would carry over to
>dealing with program structures but likely this list is far too
>small as a sample group to say anything significant about that, for
>one thing I seem to remember one occasion where it was painfully
>clear Nescivi (f) had a much better internal map of the city then I
>(m) did.
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>To continue that line of reasoning; if we -just for kicks- assume
>different people use visual analogies to different degrees and in
>different ways (this seems safe to me) that might explain why we all
>prefer certain syntaxes over others, even if many things we do could
>be accomplished just as well in other languages and systems. We may
>need more cognitive scientists here....
This is more the domain of cultural Anthropology, I would say. Why
the French prefer French?
I do agree that the different representation schemes are interesting.
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>If anybody has links to data about other variables that might affect
>internal visualisations I'd be quite interested. Gender may be nice
>and clear (most of the time) but saying anything about it tends to
>run into political discussion painfully quickly.
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>I hope that clarifies?
Yes! I wondered whether you implied any idea of an innate capacity
that differs.
Gender appers to be easy to categorise and you are right if you say
that this is a reason that often it is used as a basis for feasable
research. I guess it is political because one may wonder what kind of
scientific result this is supposed to be. I think self-observation is
so much more valuable than this type of emptiricism.
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Received on Fri Jul 11 2008 - 19:44:37 BST