Hey, I’m over here: Men and women see things differently

USC researchers show that men and women focus on different things when paying attention and are drawn away by different types of distractions

2012-08-01

(Press-News.org) 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.

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.

Dr. Itti's lab studied 34 participants as they watched videos of people being interviewed. Behind the interview subjects, within the video frame, pedestrians, bicycles and cars passed by – distractions included to pull attention away from the filmed conversation.

While participants watched and listened to the interview, another camera was pointed at participants' eyes, recording the movement of their pupils as they glanced across the screen.

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.

Dr. Laurent Itti, an associate professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, runs USC's iLab, a research lab dedicated to gaining insight into biological brain function through the use of computational modeling. John Shen, also with iLab, is a Ph.D. student in the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and conducted this research as part of his doctoral thesis and USC Provost Neuroscience Fellowship.

Funding for the project came from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Army.

### END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Are cold feet plaguing your relationship?

2012-08-01

BETHESDA, Md. (July 31, 2012) — Cold feet—those chilly appendages that plague many people in the winter and an unlucky few all year round—can be the bane of existence for singles and couples alike. In a new study, scientists led by Selvi C. Jeyaraj of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital have identified a biological mechanism that may be responsible for icy extremities: an interaction between a series of molecules and receptors on smooth muscle cells that line the skin's tiny blood vessels. The new research, along with an accompanying editorial by Martin ...

When we forget to remember -- failures in prospective memory range from annoying to lethal

2012-08-01

A surgical team closes an abdominal incision, successfully completing a difficult operation. Weeks later, the patient comes into the ER complaining of abdominal pain and an X-ray reveals that one of the forceps used in the operation was left inside the patient. Why would highly skilled professionals forget to perform a simple task they have executed without difficulty thousands of times before? These kinds of oversights occur in professions as diverse as aviation and computer programming, but research from psychological science reveals that these lapses may not reflect ...

Early treatment could mean greater earning potential for people with HIV

2012-08-01

In a first-of-its-kind health campaign in Uganda, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill show that adults with HIV who had less severe infections could work more hours per week, and their children were more likely to be enrolled in school. The finding, led by Harsha Thirumurthy, Ph.D., a health economist at UNC's Gillings School of Global Public Health, not only could mean greater earning potential for people with HIV, but also a better economic outlook for entire regions—results that underscore the potential value of testing for HIV widely ...

Mayo Clinic: Drug duo turns on cancer-fighting gene in kidney, breast cancers

2012-08-01

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A potentially powerful new approach to treating two lethal metastatic cancers — triple negative breast cancer and clear cell renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of kidney cancer — has been discovered by researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida. In the online issue of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, they report that two drugs, romidepsin and decitabine, work cooperatively to activate a potent tumor suppressor gene that is silenced in these cancers. Once the gene, secreted frizzled related protein one or sFRP1, went to work after the drugs were used, ...

As a man's belt size increases, so does his risk of sexual and urinary dysfunction

2012-08-01

NEW YORK (July 31, 2012) -- As a man's waistline grows, so can his experience with sexual dysfunction and frequent urination, say researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The study, published in the August issue of the British Journal of Urology International (BJUI), is the first to comprehensively show that obesity in men affects not just their hearts and metabolism, but also their sexual and urinary health. "The findings demonstrate that obesity in men -- part of a growing global epidemic -- affects their well-being in profound ways," ...

'Superbird' stuns researchers

2012-08-01

A team of researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the National Research Council of Argentina recently fitted a South American sea bird called an imperial cormorant with a small camera, then watched stunned as it became "superbird" – diving 150 feet underwater in 40 seconds, feeding on the ocean floor for 80 seconds where it eventually caught a snakelike fish, before returning to the surface 40 seconds later. This is the first time researchers have been able to watch first-hand the amazing feeding techniques of these fascinating birds, which occur ...

Study finds people have difficulty controlling multiple chronic conditions

2012-08-01

DENVER, July 31, 2012 – Most people who have diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol have difficultly managing all three conditions; indeed, success is fleeting for those who do manage all three, according to a Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Research study that appears online in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. The study of close to 29,000 individuals enrolled at Kaiser Permanente Colorado and Denver Health found that only 30.3 percent at Kaiser Permanente and 16.2 percent of individuals at Denver ...

Protein involved in DNA replication, centrosome regulation linked to dwarfism, small brain size

2012-08-01

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Research published Aug. 1 by scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) links gene mutations found in some patients with Meier-Gorlin syndrome (MGS) with specific cellular dysfunctions that are thought to give rise to a particularly extreme version of dwarfism, small brain size, and other manifestations of abnormal growth which generally characterize that rare condition. Although only 53 cases of Meier-Gorlin syndrome have been reported in the medical literature since the first patient was described in 1959, it is a malady whose mechanisms ...

AGU journal highlights -- 31 July 2012

2012-08-01

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Water Resources Research (WRR),Geophysical Research-Atmospheres (JGR-D), Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics (JGR-A), Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences (JGR-G), and Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (JGR-C). In this release: 1. The random walk of pollutants through river catchments 2. Atmospheric CO2 drove climate change during longest interglacial 3. Shear layers in solar winds affect Earth's magnetosphere 4. Dams impact carbon dynamics in U.S. rivers 5. ...

Wayne State research team finds possible clue to progression of MS

2012-08-01

DETROIT -- Wayne State University School of Medicine researchers, working with colleagues in Canada, have found that one or more substances produced by a type of immune cell in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) may play a role in the disease's progression. The finding could lead to new targeted therapies for MS treatment. B cells, said Robert Lisak, M.D., professor of neurology at Wayne State and lead author of the study, are a subset of lymphocytes (a type of circulating white blood cell) that mature to become plasma cells and produce immunoglobulins, proteins that ...