Differential Gaze Behavior towards Sexually Preferred and Non-Preferred Human Figures

Abstract

The gaze pattern associated with image exploration is a sensitive index of our attention, motivation and preference. To examine whether an individual's gaze behavior can reflect his/her sexual interest, we compared gaze patterns of young heterosexual men and women (M = 19.94 years, SD = 1.05) while viewing photos of plain-clothed male and female figures aged from birth to sixty years old. Our analysis revealed a clear gender difference in viewing sexually preferred figure images. Men displayed a distinctive gaze pattern only when viewing twenty-year-old female images, with more fixations and longer viewing time dedicated to the upper body and waist-hip region. Women also directed more attention at the upper body on female images in comparison to male images, but this difference was not age-specific. Analysis of local image salience revealed that observers' eye-scanning strategies could not be accounted for by low-level processes, such as analyzing local image contrast and structure, but were associated with attractiveness judgments. The results suggest that the difference in cognitive processing of sexually preferred and non-preferred figures can be manifested in gaze patterns associated with figure viewing. Thus, eye-tracking holds promise as a potential sensitive measure for sexual preference, particularly in men. 2 IntroductionVisual exploration of our environment involves a series of saccades to direct our fixation to regions that are informative or interesting to us. The preferred regions within a scene are often inspected earlier and attract more fixations and longer viewing time (Henderson, 2003). This preference-biased gaze distribution is shown to have a causal effect on conscious preference decision making (Shimojo, Simion, Shimojo, & Scheier, 2003). Gaze patterns hence provide a real-time behavior index of ongoing perceptual and cognitive processing, and could be sensitive indices of our attention, motivation, and preference, especially when exploring scenes of high ecological validity (Henderson, 2003; Isaacowitz, 2006; Rayner, 1998). phallometric assessment and self report, often attract criticism that they are intrusive (e.g., phallometric assessment), susceptible to deception (e.g., self-report), and that they lead to high levels of false negative and false positive identifications (Flak, Beech, & Fisher, 2007;Kalmus & Beech, 2005). Given the aforementioned unique characteristics 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 3 of gaze patterns, including its advantages over currently established methodologies (naturalistic and automatic, difficult to be inhibited or altered consciously) (Nummenmaa, Hyona, & Calvo, 2006), it can help us to understand cognitive processing of visually salient sexual information and may be a useful measure of sexual interest/preference. Page 2 of 33 PDF proof only--The Journal ...

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

“…Fixation locations were then extracted from the raw eye-tracking data using velocity (less than 0.2° eye displacement at a velocity of less than 20°/s) and duration (greater than 50 ms) criteria (Guo, Mahmoodi, Robertson, & Young, 2006). To determine gaze allocation within key body regions (Hall, Hogue, & Guo, 2011), each body was divided into five regions of interest: face (including hair), upper-body (from the base of the neck to the end of the rib cage), waist-hip region (including the stomach, hips, and pubic region), arms (including hands) and legs (including feet). The viewing time allocated to each region was normalised in proportion to the total viewing time sampled in that trial.…”

“…Indeed, recent eye-tracking studies have observed that in the tasks of free-viewing, body attractiveness and body fat judgement, both male and female viewers demonstrated similar gaze distribution with more gaze allocated at the waist-hip and chest areas (Cornelissen, Hancock, Kiviniemi, George, & Tovée, 2009;Hall, Hogue, & Guo, 2011). These observations of both genders using the same visual features to assess female body could be accounted for by mate selection theory, which postulates women judge their own attractiveness relative to other women in order to assess their own likelihood for successful mate selection (Buss, 2003) or monitor potential competitors as attractive women have high 'market value' (Hughes, Harrison, & Gallup, 2004;Pawlowski & Dunbar, 1999) and pose a greater threat to partner sexual fidelity (O'Connor & Feinberg, 2012).…”

Festival space: gender, liminality and the carnivalesque

“…It has been documented that women gaze upon other women, similar to men but potentially for differing reasons such as body comparison (Hall et al, 2011).…”

Visual effects in great bowerbird sexual displays and their implications for signal design

“…This contrast may be enhanced further by movement of the nuchal crest and of coloured objects in the male's beak. In addition to affecting female perception of colour, chromatic adaptation can also affect the ability to discriminate among colours [31], and interact strongly with eye movements [32,34], which may affect mate assessment and attractiveness [35]. These potential knock-on effects highlight the many unexplored avenues in the interaction between visual mechanisms and sexual displays [36].…”