Abstract

Despite well-established sex differences for cognition, audition, and somatosensation, few studies have investigated whether there are also sex differences in visual perception. We report the results of fifteen perceptual measures (such as visual acuity, visual backward masking, contrast detection threshold or motion detection) for a cohort of over 800 participants. On six of the fifteen tests, males significantly outperformed females. On no test did females significantly outperform males. Given this heterogeneity of the sex effects, it is unlikely that the sex differences are due to any single mechanism. A practical consequence of the results is that it is important to control for sex in vision research, and that findings of sex differences for cognitive measures using visually based tasks should confirm that their results cannot be explained by baseline sex differences in visual perception.

Details

Title
Sex-related differences in vision are heterogeneous
Author
Shaqiri, Albulena 1 ; Roinishvili, Maya 2 ; Grzeczkowski, Lukasz 3 ; Chkonia, Eka 4 ; Pilz, Karin 5 ; Mohr, Christine 6 ; Brand, Andreas 7 ; Kunchulia, Marina 2 ; Herzog, Michael H 1 

 Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland 
 Laboratory of Vision Physiology, Ivane Beritashvili Center of Experimental Biomedicine, Tbilisi, Georgia; Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences, Free University of Tbilisi, Tbilisi, Georgia 
 Ludwig-Maximilan University of Munich, Munich, Germany 
 Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences, Free University of Tbilisi, Tbilisi, Georgia; Department of Psychiatry, Tbilisi State Medical University, Tbilisi, Georgia 
 School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK 
 Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Bâtiment Geopolis, Quartier Mouline, Lausanne, Switzerland 
 Institute for Psychology and Cognition Research, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany 
Pages
1-10
Publication year
2018
Publication date
May 2018
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20452322
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2038680561
Copyright
© 2018. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.