Eye movements to natural images as a function of sex and personality.

Felix Joseph Mercer Moss,Roland Baddeley,Nishan Canagarajah,Luis M Martinez

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047870

Felix Joseph Mercer Moss, Roland Baddeley + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047870

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Nov 30, 2012
Citations: 50	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Bristol

Abstract

Women and men are different. As humans are highly visual animals, these differences should be reflected in the pattern of eye movements they make when interacting with the world. We examined fixation distributions of 52 women and men while viewing 80 natural images and found systematic differences in their spatial and temporal characteristics. The most striking of these was that women looked away and usually below many objects of interest, particularly when rating images in terms of their potency. We also found reliable differences correlated with the images' semantic content, the observers' personality, and how the images were semantically evaluated. Information theoretic techniques showed that many of these differences increased with viewing time. These effects were not small: the fixations to a single action or romance film image allow the classification of the sex of an observer with 64% accuracy. While men and women may live in the same environment, what they see in this environment is reliably different. Our findings have important implications for both past and future eye movement research while confirming the significant role individual differences play in visual attention.

Highlights

IntroductionResearch has found support for many of the gender stereotypes: the aggressive man and anxious woman schemas are evidentially sound [1]; women are more sensitive to social cues [2]; and boys engage in more risky behavior [3]
Folk psychology has always been generous in affording differences to women and men
In part, be attributed to sex hormones affecting cerebral organization early in life, resulting in significant anatomical differences between the brains of men and women [4]. These include sex differences in the neurophysiological systems associated with anxiety [5] and reward [6,7]

Summary

Introduction

Research has found support for many of the gender stereotypes: the aggressive man and anxious woman schemas are evidentially sound [1]; women are more sensitive to social cues [2]; and boys engage in more risky behavior [3] Such behavioural differences may, in part, be attributed to sex hormones affecting cerebral organization early in life, resulting in significant anatomical differences between the brains of men and women [4]. Optimists have been shown to display increased vigilance towards positive image regions, while pessimists show corresponding biases towards negative imagery [12] These studies highlight the influence individual differences can have on where people look, they do so over a very limited range of stimuli. Using information theoretic and Bayesian techniques, we attempted to answer the following questions: (1) are there differences between how men and women view the world; (2) what are these differences; (3) how do they vary with viewing time, image semantics and the viewers’ task and personality; and (4) why do we observe these differences?

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