News Detail

Scott Murray’s study, on visual motion processing and the differences between the genders, is the topic of this UW News story

Men and Women Show Surprising Differences in Seeing Motion

A University of Washington-led study finds differences in the ways men and women see motion.

Humans’ ability to notice moving objects has always been a useful skill, from avoiding an animal predator in ancient times to crossing a busy street in the modern world.

That evolutionary success attests to the importance of visual motion processing, and why there may be specialized regions of the brain specifically dedicated to this function ,researchers say. To shed light on how neurons respond in these regions, researchers can look for small differences in motion perception among groups of people.

One of those perceptual differences may be between the sexes.

In an article published Aug. 16 in Current Biology, a University of Washington-led team of researchers says that on average, men pick up on visual motion significantly faster than women do.

The study, which involved more than 250 adult men and women, shows that both males and females 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. But, compared 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 faster motion processing has been observed in individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), depression, and in older individuals. All three of these conditions have been linked to disruptions in the brain’s ability to “put the brakes” on neural activity. The authors speculate that this regulatory process may also be weaker in the male brain, allowing males to process visual motion faster than females.

“We were very surprised,” UW psychology professor Scott Murray said. “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 of the 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. Because boys are about four times more likely to be diagnosed with ASD than girls, the researchers included sex as a factor in their analysis of the control group, the members of which did not have ASD. The sex difference in visual perception of motion became immediately apparent.

Read the entire article here .