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Abstract
Despite well-established sex differences for cognition, audition, and somatosensation, few studies have investigated whether there are also sex differences in visual perception. We report the results of fifteen perceptual measures (such as visual acuity, visual backward masking, contrast detection threshold or motion detection) for a cohort of over 800 participants. On six of the fifteen tests, males significantly outperformed females. On no test did females significantly outperform males. Given this heterogeneity of the sex effects, it is unlikely that the sex differences are due to any single mechanism. A practical consequence of the results is that it is important to control for sex in vision research, and that findings of sex differences for cognitive measures using visually based tasks should confirm that their results cannot be explained by baseline sex differences in visual perception.
Highlights
In 1894 Ellis[1] noted that female high school students performed better on verbal memory tasks than male students
Out of the 10 perceptual tests (3 tests for 626 participants and 7 additional tests for 200 participants), males performed significantly better than females in 5 tests: visual acuity, visual backward masking with 25 and 5 gratings, reaction time (RT), biological motion, and motion direction
We found significant differences in Sample A, with 626 participants, on visual acuity and visual backward masking with both masks, but not for the unmasked vernier
Summary
In 1894 Ellis[1] noted that female high school students performed better on verbal memory tasks than male students (for a review, see[2]). Other studies on visual acuity[23,24], contrast sensitivity[16,18,25], motion perception[26,27] and slant estimation[28,29] had a limited number of participants and showed mixed results (for a review, see[17]). Two studies have reported that males outperform females in the Simon task, for both the incongruent (n = 418)[32] and congruent conditions (n = 176)[33], respectively. Taken together, these studies reveal mixed and complex effects of sex on visual perception. In cognition could be explained instead by differences in vision, e.g. sex differences in attention might instead be explained by differences in visual filtering[34]
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