The Gender Psychology of Losing Your Car in a Parking Lot

The Wall Street Journal caught our eye this week with mention of new research on a favorite subject of academic study at Atlantic Cities: the parking lot. Even better: a mall parking lot! Turns out such places are great for studying human cognition and spatial memory, or how we sense where we are in our surroundings, and where we left really important stuff… like the car.

Experimental psychologists have been studying this with actual shoppers in the Netherlands. Half of them reported having regular trouble remembering where they parked (so you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re realizing right now that you have no idea where you last put the Zipcar). Men, however – in this study at least – seemed to do a better job of estimating the distance to their cars and then finding them without embarrassing detours.