Sex differences in visuomotor tracking

James Mathew,Guillaume S Masson,Frederic R Danion

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-68069-0

Abstract

There is a growing interest in sex differences in human and animal cognition. However, empirical evidences supporting behavioral and neural sex differences in humans remain sparse. Visuomotor behaviors offer a robust and naturalistic empirical framework to seek for the computational mechanisms underlying sex biases in cognition. In a large group of human participants (N = 127), we investigated sex differences in a visuo-oculo-manual motor task that consists of tracking with the hand a target moving unpredictably. We report a clear male advantage in hand tracking accuracy. We tested whether men and women employ different gaze strategy or hand movement kinematics. Results show no key difference in these distinct visuomotor components. However, highly consistent differences in eye-hand coordination were evidenced by a larger temporal lag between hand motion and target motion in women. This observation echoes with other studies showing a male advantage in manual reaction time to visual stimuli. We propose that the male advantage for visuomotor tracking does not reside in a more reliable gaze strategy, or in more sophisticated hand movements, but rather in a faster decisional process linking visual information about target motion with forthcoming hand, but not eye, actions.

Highlights

There is a growing interest in sex differences in human and animal cognition
We successively present the data from the first cohort in which both eye and hand movements were recorded, and the data from the second cohort in order to test the robustness of our findings regarding manual tracking and sex differences
We conclude that this difference in the timing of hand motion timing is crucial for the male advantage exhibited during manual tracking

Summary

Introduction

There is a growing interest in sex differences in human and animal cognition. empirical evidences supporting behavioral and neural sex differences in humans remain sparse. In a large group of human participants (N = 127), we investigated sex differences in a visuo-oculo-manual motor task that consists of tracking with the hand a target moving unpredictably. Highly consistent differences in eye-hand coordination were evidenced by a larger temporal lag between hand motion and target motion in women This observation echoes with other studies showing a male advantage in manual reaction time to visual stimuli. It has been proposed that males and females employ distinct gaze behavior when solving cognitive tasks such as mental r otation[32] or the salesman p roblem[33] for instances All these observations encouraged the comparison of male and female gaze behavior as this could account for sex differences in manual tracking

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion