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posted by janrinok on Monday August 20 2018, @06:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the because-men-lie-on-the-couch dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday August 20 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 20 2018, @08:47PM (#723906)

    Alternately, it's that the men who are best able to observe and dodge flying frying pans have the best odds of surviving and reproducing. (just kidding)

    Some other relevant questions:
    1. Is this sort of thing repeatable with other primates?
    2. How much of a difference does this delay actually make in humans' ability to hunt or fight or play sports or what have you?
    3. How much of a variation was there within each group? For instance, if male response times ranged from 0.05s-0.15s, and the women took from 0.07s-0.17s, yes, that's a substantial difference, but the 0.1s within each group's range matters more than the gender difference.

    My understanding of current anthropology is that primitive peoples, and presumably by extension early human groups, were and are flexible enough to adjust the roles to the people rather than the people to the roles. So, for instance, if a girl shows a real aptitude for hunting, the trend is to train and encourage her to hunt, rather than trying to force her by arbitrary rules into not hunting, because that means more meat for the group to eat. Also, there's lots of archaeological evidence that women were involved in hunting and fighting, especially in cases where they were going after large animals so they needed everyone they could get.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:26AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:26AM (#724009)

    Humans don't really hunt that intensely. We just throw a pointy stick or stone at any stationary living being and march down the blood trail until we catch up with the dying animal, kill it, skin it and carry the meat in carved up pieces back home. We prefer large hunting parties mostly to scare off other predators and to carry more meat back. The biggest challenge hunters face is footwear and clothing: Human feet are awful and barely traverse any terrain at all while our ankles twist at the slightest misstep and we just don't have the fur for running through bushes like our prey does.

    More importantly, don't underrate how polygenic something like reaction times are. That is, it would have been easier to just select other more physical traits over cognitive ones so we have to excuse why we don't have much bigger muscles and far more stamina along such special cognitive optimizations.

    Personally I think it's just a random side effect of women having 10% smaller brains to specialize in child bearing. That's to say, men aren't fast. Women are just slow.