MILAN—While men generally suffer hearing aid more often and earlier than women, a recent study has found that in at least one aspect of hearing the male gender has the edge.
Writing in the June 2011 issue of Cortex, a journal on the study of cognition and the relationship between the nervous system and mental processes, Ida Zündorf, from the Center of Neurology at Tübingen University, Germany, and co-authors Hans-Otto Karnath and Dr. Jörg Lewald, also from Tübingen University, report the findings of a study designed to see if men’s established advantage over women in visuo-spatial abilities extends to the audio-spatial realm.
Earlier research has shown that, thanks to their heightened visuo-spatial skills, men tend to take less time than women in tasks such as parking a car and have less trouble in navigating in a new city.
Using a sound-localization task that they had developed, the Tübingen researchers enlisted healthy male and female adults to participate. The subjects were asked to listen to sounds and determine the location of the sound source, either by pointing toward it or by naming the exact position (e.g., 4º left).
When the sounds were presented one at a time, men and women alike performed the task with great accuracy. But when several sounds were presented simultaneously and participants had to focus on and localize only one sound, the women had much more difficulty than men. In some cases, women thought the sounds were coming from the opposite direction from their actual source.
These results suggest that men are not only better at visuo-spatial tasks, but also in auditory-spatial tasks. The authors believe that the male advantage in localizing sound in a “cocktail party situation” where several voices are speaking simultaneously indicates that the difference is related to a “high attentional mechanism” in the brain that is specifically involved in extracting the spatial information about one particular sound source in a noisy environment.
