Few men are required to go into the wilderness these days to get food for Sunday dinner. But it seems they can't shed their hunter-like tendencies when it comes to the Internet, according to Canadian researchers.

Two brothers from Quebec have found that men use hunting skills acquired through years of gender evolution when moving through the World Wide Web.

The brothers -- one a doctoral student in psychology, the other in marketing -- created two online bookstores for their study.

They suspected that a wide site, one that kept them close to the homepage, would appeal most to women, who as gatherers traditionally stayed close to home to forage for berries and vegetables.

They also suspected that men would prefer a deep site, which would allow them to navigate through more links using the internal navigation skills they would have used as hunters.

"So if all of this has a little bit of truth to it then we would notice that the women would much prefer the wide structures, simply because there are a lot of landmarks, compared to the deep structure, which you need an internal compass to go through lots of links," study author Philippe Stenstrom told CTV.ca.

Not surprisingly, men reported spending less time to complete tasks when they used the deep website compared to women. They also worked faster on the deep website than they did on the wide site.

"It's not because the Internet appears that all of a sudden our brain developed these new modes of navigation," said Stenstrom, a doctoral student in psychology at the Universite de Montreal. "Whether navigation is virtual, on the Internet, or in real life, it's still going to use the same underlying cognitive processes and neuro-physiological mechanisms."

His brother Eric Stenstrom, a doctoral student in marketing at Concordia University led the research under the supervision of marketing professor Gad Saad. The team published its findings this week in the journal IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

Previous studies have found that skills men and women use to surf the Web were originally acquired through human evolution to complete survival tasks such as hunting and gathering food.

Men, as hunters, often went into unknown territory and used inherent navigation skills to find ideal hunting grounds.

As gatherers, women used landmarks in order to stay close to the home while they looked for foods such as berries and vegetables.

The brothers suspected that if 99 per cent of human evolution occurred during times of hunter-gatherers, as research suggests, then these skills would still be used today in new forms of navigation, such as surfing the Internet.

For the purposes of their study, the Stenstroms asked participants to locate a number of book titles on the two online bookstores they created.

The wide site had links to all of the books on the homepage, while the deep site had a number of categories users had to navigate before finding specific titles.

The female subjects reported taking the same amount of time to use both sites and weren't any faster on the wide site compared to men.

But the researchers did find that men and women respond differently to visual cues:

• Women prefer clear visual guidelines such as bold colours, markers they would have looked for when foraging for berries.
• Men prefer animation and other moving objects, skills they would have used while hunting animals.

The findings suggest that website designers consider gender differences when designing their sites, particularly if they are targeting one gender over another, Stenstrom said.

Abstract:

Online Hunting and Gathering: An Evolutionary Perspective on Sex Differences in Website Preferences and Navigation

Despite numerous sex differences found in spatial navigation, perception, and verbal abilities, the manner in which these differences manifest themselves in terms of online navigation has yet to be explored. We propose a unified framework based on evolutionary psychology and supported by recent findings in cognitive neuroscience for understanding sex differences in cognition and how they relate to online navigation and website preferences. The literature on sex differences in navigation, object location, spatial rotation, the perception of color, form, and movement, and verbal fluency is reviewed within the context of their evolutionary underpinnings. Based on these findings, specific website design recommendations are proposed. Results of a pilot study examining sex differences in web navigation provide evidence that utilizing an evolutionary approach can engender findings with significant implications for e-communication researchers and practitioners alike.