Eyes meander according to sex

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

In a new study published in the journal Vision Research, researchers at the University of Southern California show that the eyes and attention of men and women meander in distinctly different ways, Sceince Daily reported yesterday.

The article, authored by Dr. Laurent Itti and doctoral student John Shen, challenges the way scientists generally conceive of attention, or how sensory information is prioritized.

While previous study of vision and attention had disregarded individual factors such as sex, race and age, Itti and Shen demonstrated that men and women pay visual attention in different ways.

Researchers discovered the following: Men, when focused on the person being interviewed, parked their eyes on the speaker’s mouth. They tended to be most distracted by distinctive movement behind the interview subjects. By contrast, women shift their focus between the interview subject’s eyes and body. When they were distracted, it was typically by other people entering the video frame.