Qiliang He¹, Brandon Fross², John Perkins¹, Dylan Hunter¹; ¹the University of Texas at San Antonio, ²Trinity University

While research has extensively examined how global and local landmarks influence sex differences in spatial navigation, the effects of regional landmarks—visual features that demarcate different sections within complex environments (like color zones in hospitals)—remain unexplored. These landmarks provide general location information but offer neither the precise positional information of local landmarks nor the orientational information of global landmarks. We investigated how regional landmarks affect sex differences in navigation and subsequent decision-making, examining whether these effects are moderated by self-reported sense of direction (SOD). Participants completed wayfinding tasks of varied difficulty in virtual environments with or without regional landmarks, followed by value-based decision-making tasks that depends on the learning outcome of the previous wayfinding tasks. Results revealed that regional landmarks' effects on sex differences are moderated by SOD. In route-learning tasks with regional landmarks present, low-SOD men outperformed low-SOD women, whereas high-SOD women performed equally or better than high-SOD men. In task that require cognitive mapping, the SOD effect disappeared; women performed comparably to men with regional landmarks present but showed significantly worse performance without them. Additionally, when controlling for consistency in memory-based decision-making, high-SOD women demonstrated increased risk-taking behavior in environments with regional landmarks. These findings help reconcile mixed results in the literature regarding sex differences in landmark utilization and decision-making, suggest the importance of considering the interaction between environmental factors and spatial ability in understanding navigation-related sex differences. Our results have practical implications for designing navigational aids in modern buildings.