memory to guess an angle, forward errors are significantly smaller than backward errors, implying that memorizing the opposite direction is more difficult than memorizing the forward direction of travel. Coding There are many strategies used to spatially encode the environment, and they are often used together within the same task. In a recent study, König et aliae provided further evidence by letting participants learn the positions of streets and houses from an interactive map. Participants reproduced their knowledge in both relative and absolute terms by indicating the positions of houses and streets in relation to one another and their absolute locations using cardinal directions. Some participants were allowed three seconds to form their description, while others were not given a time limit. Their conclusions show that positions of houses were best remembered in relative tasks, while streets were best remembered in absolute tasks, and that increasing allotted time for cognitive reasoning improved performance for both. These findings suggest, that circumscribed objects like houses, which would be sensory available at one moment during an active exploration, are more likely to be encoded in a relative/binary coded way and that time for cognitive reasoning allows the conversion into an absolute/unitary coded format, which is the deduction of their absolute position in line with cardinal directions, compass bearings etc. Contrary, bigger and more abstract objects like streets are more likely to be encoded in an absolute manner from the beginning. That confirms the view of mixed strategies, in this case that spatial information of different objects is coded in distinct ways within the same task. Moreover, the orientation and location of objects like houses seems to be primarily learned in an action-oriented way, which is also in line with an enactive framework for human cognition. In genders In a study of two congeneric rodent species, sex differences in hippocampal size were predicted by sex-specific patterns of spatial cognition. Hippocampal size is known to correlate positively with maze performance in laboratory mouse strains and with selective pressure for spatial memory among passerine bird species. In polygamous vole species (Rodentia: Microtus), males range more widely than females in the field and perform better on laboratory measures of spatial ability; both of these differences are absent in monogamous vole species. Ten females and males were taken from natural populations of two vole species, the polygamous meadow vole, M. pennsylvanicus, and the monogamous pine vole, M. pinetorum.