2008/7/11 Julian Rohrhuber <rohrhuber_at_uni-hamburg.de>:
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> An honest question: Why do you find it interesting as a consequence of
> gender?
>
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.
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.
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....
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.
I hope that clarifies?
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Fri Jul 11 2008 - 19:29:40 BST