Still little evidence sex differences in spatial navigation are evolutionary adaptations.

A putative male advantage in wayfinding ability is the most widely documented sex difference in human cognition and has also been observed in other animals. The common interpretation, the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis, posits that this male advantage evolved as an adaptive response to sex differences in home range size. A previous study a decade ago tested this hypothesis by comparing sex differences in home range size and spatial ability among 11 species and found no relationship. However, the study was limited by the small sample size, the lack of species with a larger female home range and the lack of non-Western human data. The present study represents an update that addresses all of these limitations, including data from 10 more species and from human subsistence cultures. Consistent with the previous result, we found little evidence that sex differences in spatial navigation and home range size are related. We conclude that sex differences in spatial ability are more likely due to experiential factors and/or unselected biological side effects, rather than functional outcomes of natural selection.

Early adversity, adult lifestyle, and posttraumatic stress disorder in a military sample.

Early adversity is considered a major risk factor for adult posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Simultaneously, however, early adversity is also known to contribute to psychological resilience, and, indeed, some high-adversity groups do not display elevated PTSD risk. We explored correlates of PTSD in the Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers military dataset to evaluate contrasting accounts of the relationship between early adversity and PTSD. The standard deficit model depicts ontogeny as inherently vulnerable to insult, such that early adversity yields a less robust adult phenotype. A complementary life history theory account holds that adverse early experiences cue a fast life history orientation that reduces investment in maintenance, yielding an adult phenotype less able to recover from trauma. An opposing life history theory account holds that early adversity cues expectations of an adverse adult environment, adaptively reducing reactivity to adverse events. We use principal component analysis to extract a latent variable representing several childhood experiences and multiple lifestyle factors that plausibly proxy life history orientation. After correcting for covariates, we find a strong positive influence of such proxies on PTSD risk, suggesting that early adversity may indeed increase risk for PTSD, and thus that either the standard deficit model, the reduced maintenance account or a combination are correct.

Male superiority in spatial navigation: adaptation or side effect?

In the past few decades, sex differences in spatial cognition have often been attributed to adaptation in response to natural selection. A common explanation is that home range size differences between the sexes created different cognitive demands pertinent to wayfinding in each sex and resulted in the evolution of sex differences in spatial navigational ability in both humans and nonhuman mammals. However, the assumption of adaptation as the appropriate mode of explanation was nearly simultaneous with the discovery and subsequent verification of the male superiority effect, even without any substantive evidence establishing a causal role for adaptation. An alternate possibility that the sex difference in cognition is a genetic or hormonal side effect has not been rigorously tested using the comparative method. The present study directly evaluates how well the range hypothesis fits the available data on species differences in spatial ability by use of a phylogenetically based, cross-species, comparative analysis. We find no support for the hypothesis that species differences in home range size dimorphism are positively associated with parallel differences in spatial navigation abilities. The alternative hypothesis that sex differences in spatial cognition result as a hormonal side effect is better supported by the data.