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Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 16 have found an unexpected difference between men and women. On average, their studies show, men pick up on visual motion significantly faster than women do.
Individuals representing both sexes are good at reporting whether black and white bars on a screen are moving to the left or to the right -- requiring only a tenth of a second and often much less to make the right call, the researchers found. But, in comparison to men, women regularly took about 25 to 75 percent longer.
The researchers say that the faster perception of motion by males may not necessarily reflect better visual processing. They note that similar performance enhancements in this same task have been observed in individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or depression and in older individuals. The authors speculate that processes in the brain that down-regulate neural activity are disrupted in these conditions and may also be weaker in males.
"We were very surprised," says Scott Murray at the University of Washington, Seattle. "There is very little evidence for sex differences in low-level visual processing, especially differences as large as those we found in our study."
Murray and co-author Duje Tadin, University of Rochester, say that the finding was "entirely serendipitous." They were using the visual motion task to study processing differences in individuals with ASD. ASD shows a large sex bias, with boys being about four times more likely to be diagnosed with the condition than girls. As a result, the researchers included sex as a factor in their analysis of control individuals in the study who didn't have ASD. The sex difference in visual perception of motion became immediately apparent.
To confirm the findings, the researchers asked other investigators who had used the same task in their own experiments for additional data representing larger numbers of study participants. And those independent data showed the same pattern of sex difference.
See also: Sex Differences in Visual Motion Processing. Current Biology, 2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.014 ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.014 )
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180816143237.htm
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Monday August 20 2018, @08:24PM (1 child)
Sometimes makes people quite a bit better at some specific tasks than the general population. On average this isn't the case, but there are some spectacular examples.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @09:26PM
What I find much more appalling is the benchmark this little piece of experimental biology sets: in this here our time, it's impossible to neutrally report the impartial result of a fucking scientific experiment without relativizing the innocent, unprejudiced numbers. Surely men cannot have a measurable biological advantage over women, it's BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING AUTISTS!!!11one
Sad world we live in. Dealing with facts has become a swinging waltz on eggshells. Let's get some actual autists to do the actual science, I'd much prefer their reporting over these wimps crampedly canting in denial of the hereditary reality of their physical being.