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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: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Monday August 20 2018, @09:13PM (2 children)
Is it because it's a game to win for men and a study for women?
Guy: "Gotta be the fastest"
Gal: "Interesting, but meh"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @09:31PM
Yeah.... no. Just like you can't go back on this statement with the LOL I TROL U defense, the women in this study can't go back on their lack of performance by claiming to have multitasked some social media or whatever... here's a plain and simple fact of how men and women measurably differ. Seeing is believing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @08:45AM
Reminds me of a physics lesson back at school, where the teacher wanted to demonstrate how to calculate Power in a practical manner. The task? Weigh the students, then get them to run up the stairs and time how quickly each one takes. You can then calculate Power for each person by plugging in the values for Mass (from weight), Time, and vertical Distance travelled to ascend the staircase into the relevant equation.
Distance was the same for everyone - only one set of staircase used. So the value of Power would change for each person based on their differences in weight and speed. Heavier people and faster people would calculate out to have higher Power.
Naturally all the boys ended up competing against each other to see who could run up the stairs the fastest to get as high a Power value possible for themselves. The girls didn't care though, they all just walked up the stairs as normal. Pretty sure some of the girls didn't even want to get weighed, and just used "guesstimates" for their weight to plug into the equation.