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
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @07:46PM (14 children)
Time to destroy some careers. Twitter team MOBILIZE. Facebook team ATTACK.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @07:54PM (13 children)
Time to trigger the snowflake incels! REALITY GO!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Sulla on Monday August 20 2018, @08:25PM (4 children)
The crazies on the right do not go out of their way to destroy careers of those on the left nearly as much as those on the left going after those on the right. People who have had their careers ruined by those on the right include the girl from gamergate and maybe that Rick and Morty guy. One was for a girl sleeping with guys (or suggesting she would) to get higher game ratings and the other had some cringy pedo-tier stuff in their history. Folks on the right who have been gone after would include James Demore (pointed out differences in learning between men and women and suggested better targeting to help women), Lindsay Shepherd (showed a video in a class discussing pronouns), Elon Musk (donated to Republicans (and also Democrats)), and on and on.
Part of the problem is that the left isn't going after just people like O'Reilly (sexual assault allegations) it is going after people for a lot of silly stuff too. James Demore got attacked for pointing out ways to help better attract women to google by better focusing training and advertisements based on scientific differences between men and women. Shepherd was attacked for showing a video including a view she disagreed with because she believed in open debate. Elon Musk who gives to more democrats than republicans was attacked for giving anything to republicans.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday August 20 2018, @09:52PM (2 children)
Eugenics was all the rage throughout the western world in the early 20th century, it wasn't just Germany.
But so as to properly Godwinize this threads ensuing discussion I recently learned that NAZI Germany's program to murder the physically disabled as well as THE MENTALLY ILL and mentally disabled started a few months _before_ World War II broke out in September 1939.
The German program was called "Aktion T4", with the murders carried out primarily by the doctors who were entrusted with their murder victims' care.
There is at least one documented case of a mentally-disabled woman being sterilized in the US that I've turned up so far.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:32AM
Haha, "at least one". TONS of people were sterilized in the US. Mentally challenged, native americans, black people, mexican people, the list goes on. A LOT of people.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday August 21 2018, @02:16PM
FYI, records show that there were at least 65,000 people involuntarily sterilized in the USA [wikipedia.org], with the operations continuing at least into the 1980s. This is a disturbing but enlightening piece on the history [pbs.org] in case you are interested.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:56AM
Fake news, troll-boy.
Damore (sic) got fired from Google for posting his controversial personal views all over Google's company message board.
Justine Tunney's views are just as controversial, if not more so, but she didn't post them in the same place as Damore, and she still works there.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @08:39PM (7 children)
Observation: men are better at a task than women.
Conclusion: it must be because men are inferior.
Completely missed: this gives us a test that illustrates the brain sex exists. (wouldn't recommend it as a diagnostic for brain sex though, just more proof that brain sex is not a social construct.)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 20 2018, @09:56PM (2 children)
Define better...
sounds like it might also apply to the next story about teledillidonics.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:26AM (1 child)
Exactly: "define better". At some tasks, men have always done better than women, overall. At other tasks, women have always done better than men. All of the tasks need to be done, so men and women each do the ones that need to be done. That doesn't necessarily bar a woman from doing "manual labor", nor does it bar a man from cooking, cleaning, and child rearing.
Our brains, as well as our physique, developed along certain lines for survival reasons. Odd that we've survived long enough to complain about it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:23AM
If you want to go pure evolutionary basis on it: this is a social drive for diversity, more or less the opposite of the "Master Race" extremism. Extremes can go too far in any direction.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 20 2018, @10:11PM (2 children)
Woah! *THE* brain sex? So how does that work now? Do you take the two brains and rub them together? And assuming you gotta remove them from the skull, correct? I'm kinda lost here.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @11:19PM
FTFY. I s'pose that's because somebody fucked your mind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:16AM
If the brain isn't a gendered organ, then gender is nothing but a social construct, and you should be forcibly transitioned to female ASAP, due to the all of the benefits that are statistically correllated with being a woman.
Without brain sex, the only basis you have for calling yourself a man is an organ that can be easily cut off. Just think how much happier you'd be as a woman.... At least think of how much you'd save on car insurance by switching to female!
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Tuesday August 21 2018, @07:25AM
Not necessarily. The often cited ability of men to visualize 3D space better is largely due to practice.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Sulla on Monday August 20 2018, @08:28PM (7 children)
It's almost like natural selection pushed men in the direction of being able to sense motion better to be the best hunters they could be (or die trying) and the same pressures were not applied to women who did not hunt as much. Who would have thought.
Although that would be kind of weird. Wouldn't this apply across sexes? What male-specific gene causes this, or female-specific gene restricts it?
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 20 2018, @08:31PM (2 children)
That was my thought too. As far as genes go I would think it will turn out to be a combination of genes rather than just one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @08:48PM (1 child)
It is probably also influenced by environment.*
*I am being sarcastic, every human trait is determined by multiple genes and the environment.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @09:08PM
You must have a very strong sarcasm gene.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday August 20 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:26AM (1 child)
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.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 23 2018, @02:42PM
We don't have the fur that causes the animals we chase to overheat as we chase them across the African plains.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @09:29AM
Boys also physically fight more... Play more action games. Do more dangerous stuff.
More little girls at playgrounds have sit down meetings and discussions. If there's movement (running, cycling) more girls prefer to keep it at relatively safer speeds.
More boys on the other hand tend to try to go as fast as they can.
Why? Because males are more expendable to the human species than the females. To keep the human species reproduction rate at a particular level you don't need as many males as you need females. To successfully produce another human you need the female around for at least 9 months and usually more. Whereas you just need the male around for a few minutes.
Thus it was better for the species for the past thousands of generations if more males had urges to push the limits while more females didn't. If a human male pushes the limits and dies, it's no great loss. And if a human male pushes the limits and survives then he might have some useful genes for the gene pool.
(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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @09:34PM
I suspect since men have been the primary soldiers and physical defense of the household throughout the vast majority of history, there's been a strong selection for quick reflexes. Dodge the spear/knife/arrow/stone/fist, -or- die.
But there also seem to be trade-offs. Women are better at remembering the location of randomly placed objects in some studies. Men specialized in protecting the house-hold, while women specialized in organizing it.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday August 20 2018, @09:37PM
Women sense danger better than men do, but men actually see it better than women.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Monday August 20 2018, @10:07PM
"men pick up on visual motion significantly faster than women do"
This may be more a motivational rather than physiological distinction.
Guys just like seeing things swinging and bouncing around more.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Tuesday August 21 2018, @02:11AM
Since neither men or women actually exist, gender being a socially construct, and this so called study didn't even consider trans people at all, it is all just so problematic. Everyone involved in writing this study, allowing it to be published, everyone at Soylent who submitted it and approved it should all report to the nearest reprogramming center. This cis normative hate simply can't be permitted in $current_year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:04AM
That women make better tanks and men make better DPS?
(Score: 1) by doke on Tuesday August 21 2018, @03:39PM
Could it just be that very few mothers take their daughters out to play catch?