Gender differences in spatial perception of body tilt

Naylor, Yoko K.; McBeath, Michael K.

doi:10.3758/pp.70.2.199

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Participants were tilted on their left-hand side and had to discriminate the tilt of a bar in three conditions, visual, haptic and bimodal. Although previous research has shown effects given by gender in the perception of body orientation (41), we tested this aspect in our study and observed no influence of gender (see Supplementary Materials). Our results show biases that reflect undercompensation or overcompensation of body tilt depending on the encoding sensory modality and subjects' age.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Biases in the Visual and Haptic Subjective Vertical Reveal the Role of Proprioceptive/Vestibular Priors in Child Development

Cuturi

Gori

2019

Front. Neurol.

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Investigation of the perception of verticality permits to disclose the perceptual mechanisms that underlie balance control and spatial navigation. Estimation of verticality in unusual body orientation with respect to gravity (e.g., laterally tilted in the roll plane) leads to biases that change depending on the encoding sensory modality and the amount of tilt. A well-known phenomenon is the A-effect, that is a bias toward the body tilt often interpreted in a Bayesian framework to be the byproduct of a prior peaked at the most common head and body orientation, i.e., upright. In this study, we took advantage of this phenomenon to study the interaction of visual, haptic sensory information with vestibular/proprioceptive priors across development. We tested children (5–13 y.o) and adults (>22 y.o.) in an orientation discrimination task laterally tilted 90° to their left-ear side. Experimental conditions differed for the tested sensory modality: visual-only, haptic-only, both modalities. Resulting accuracy depended on the developmental stage and the encoding sensory modality, showing A-effects in vision across all ages and in the haptic modality only for the youngest children whereas bimodal judgments show lack of multisensory integration in children. A Bayesian prior model nicely predicts the behavioral data when the peak of the prior distribution shifts across age groups. Our results suggest that vision is pivotal to acquire an idiotropic vector useful for improving precision when upright. The acquisition of such a prior might be related to the development of head and trunk coordination, a process that is fundamental for gaining successful spatial navigation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Biases in the Visual and Haptic Subjective Vertical Reveal the Role of Proprioceptive/Vestibular Priors in Child Development

Cuturi

Gori

2019

Front. Neurol.

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“…To solve the slope task, participants had to focus on all the cues (visual, vestibular, and kinesthetic) deriving from the inclination of the enclosure relative to the horizontal plane (determined by the gravity axis). Other tasks that share a similar emphasis on the vertical/horizontal reference frame have also shown a sex difference in favor of men-for example, the estimation of body tilt ( Naylor & McBeath, 2008), the verbal judgment of hill slants ( Proffitt et al, 1995), the Water Level test, and the Rod and Frame test ( Linn & Petersen, 1985;Voyer et al, 1995). It has been suggested that a sex difference might arise because women experience a difficulty in the processing of vestibular information ( Sholl, 1989).…”

Section: Sex Difference In the Use Of A Multi--modal Directional Cuementioning

confidence: 99%

The world is not flat: Can people reorient using slope?

Nardi¹,

Newcombe²,

Shipley³

2011

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Studies of spatial representation generally focus on flat environments and visual input. However, the world is not flat, and slopes are part of most natural environments. In a series of 4 experiments, we examined whether humans can use a slope as a source of allocentric, directional information for reorientation. A target was hidden in a corner of a square, featureless enclosure tilted at a 5° angle. Finding it required using the vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual cues associated with the slope gradient. In Experiment 1, the overall sample performed above chance, showing that slope is sufficient for reorientation in a real environment. However, a sex difference emerged; men outperformed women by 1.4 SDs because they were more likely to use a slope-based strategy. In Experiment 2, attention was drawn to the slope, and participants were prompted to rely on it to solve the task; however, men still outperformed women, indicating a greater ability to use slope. In Experiment 3, we excluded the possibility that women's disadvantage was due to wearing heeled footwear. In Experiment 4, women required more time than men to identify the uphill direction of the slope gradient; this suggests that, in a bottom-up fashion, a perceptual or attentional difficulty underlies women's disadvantage in the ability to use slope and their decreased reliance on this cue. Overall, a bi-coordinate representation was used to find the goal: The target was encoded primarily with respect to the vertical axis and secondarily with respect to the orthogonal axis of the slope.

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“…One striking anecdote of this phenomenon is to consider the streets in San Francisco. Even in pictures, these streets appear to be astronomically steep, but the steepest street in San Francisco is reportedly 17.5 degrees (Naylor and McBeath, 2008 ). The general overestimation of geographical slant was originally reported in the literature by Kammann ( 1967 ), but more recently it has been systematically studied by Proffitt and colleagues (Proffitt et al, 1995 ).…”

Section: The Economy Of Social Resources and Its Influence On Spatialmentioning

confidence: 99%

The economy of social resources and its influence on spatial perceptions

Gross

Proffítt

2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Survival for any organism, including people, is a matter of resource management. To ensure survival, people necessarily budget their resources. Spatial perceptions contribute to resource budgeting by scaling the environment to an individual’s available resources. Effective budgeting requires setting a balance of income and expenditures around some baseline value. For social resources, this baseline assumes that the individuals are embedded in their social network. A review of the literature supports the proposal that our visual perceptions vary based on the implicit budgeting of physical and social resources, where social resources, as they fluctuate relative to a baseline, can directly alter our visual perceptions.

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Gender differences in spatial perception of body tilt

Cited by 16 publications

References 62 publications

Biases in the Visual and Haptic Subjective Vertical Reveal the Role of Proprioceptive/Vestibular Priors in Child Development

Biases in the Visual and Haptic Subjective Vertical Reveal the Role of Proprioceptive/Vestibular Priors in Child Development

The world is not flat: Can people reorient using slope?

The economy of social resources and its influence on spatial perceptions

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