Did this study make any attempt to compare direction-finding strategies of people in different countries? I notice a difference in how Brits and Americans give driving directions: Americans go by street names and numbers, while Brits tend to talk a bit more about landmarks (mostly pubs).

Someone spent actual money on this? Let's see, I use landmarks when that makes things easier, but I have a very good directional sense. Whether driving in the city or the boonies, it has so far been impossible for me to truly get lost. I can read a map, I can orienteer--but I'll tell you mine is the "fifth house on the right" because isn't that easier than trying to read addresses on mailboxes in the rain?

The major reason for researching things like this is to figure out gender-related brain differences. Honestly, though, it's only really important to know how a person gives you directions, so that you know how to follow them.

For an example, if you ask my brother for directions, your best bet is to get the final address and run it through a direction-finding app. He has a distressing tendency to advocate wrong turns. However, if you put him on the ground with a map and a compass and a vague comment of "we left our packs by a valley stream", he'll find it every time. So consider the source...

You're misunderstanding the point of the study, I think.

The research is not trying to show how men should or should not find directions, but is using directions as a means of exploring a well-known disproportionality in visual-spatial and mathematical reasoning between males and females (and, of course, the tendency for homosexuals as a group to exhibit thought processes more closely linked with the thought processes of females as a group). The use of landmarks versus directions and distance is a good example of using visual-spatial reasoning instead of mathematical.

The fact that it is, indeed, both a choice and a matter of upbringing has little to do with the study, as differences in choice and training happen on both sides (or all four sides, as it were) of the fence, and are cancelled out (assuming a large test group).

Extremely interesting. The style of the way you write. Those 2 hemispheres of the brain again? Wyndham Lewis and Henri Bergson? Ayn Rand and Oswald Spengler?.... Hmmm.... I read a map when I'm trying to find my way around an area I don't know too well. Otherwise, I tend to navigate using familiar landmarks.

"Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set."
-The Bible (also ancient Egyptian) (quoted in Clarence E. Manion's The Key to Peace: A Formula for the Perpetuation of Real Americanism)

The style of that!

I love the style of maps. Interesting to look at. Thinking about it, the grid of a street map reminds me of a spectrum. A spectrum is a map of ideologies.

Reminds me of that picture in Charles Hampden-Turner's Maps of the Mind of a grid superimposed upon a human figure, the Normative superimposed upon the Humanistic, the Right superimposed upon the Left.

"Is Man the measure, an active, creative, thinking, loving, desiring force in nature? Or must man realize himself, attain his full stature, only in struggle toward, participation in, conformity to a norm, a measure, an ideal essence, basically independent of Man?"
-Silvan Tomkins

The style of that!

Man and Woman, the Male and the Female, the Heterosexual and the Homosexual, the Androsexual and the Gynosexual.... Hmmm....

Thinking of maps reminds me again of the Mercator Map, attacked by the Left, defended by the Right.