Patterns of eye movements when male and female observers judge female attractiveness, body fat and waist-to-hip ratio

Abstract

Behavioural studies of the perceptual cues for female physical attractiveness have suggested two potentially important features; body fat distribution (the waist-to-hip ratio or WHR) and overall body fat (often estimated by the body mass index or BMI). However none of these studies tell us directly which regions of the stimulus images inform observers' judgments. Therefore, we recorded the eye-movements of 3 groups of 10 male observers and 3 groups of 10 female observers, when they rated a set of 46 photographs of female bodies. The first sets of observers rated the images for attractiveness, the second sets rated for body fat and the third sets for WHR. If either WHR and/or body fat are used to judge attractiveness, then observers rating attractiveness should look at those areas of the body which allow assessment of these features, and they should look in the same areas when they are directly asked to estimate WHR and body fat. So we are able to compare the fixation patterns for the explicit judgments with those for attractiveness judgments, and infer which features were used for attractiveness. Prior to group analysis of the eye-movement data, the locations of individual eye fixations were transformed into a common reference space to permit comparisons of fixation density at high resolution across all stimuli. This manipulation allowed us to use spatial statistical analysis techniques to show: 1) Observers' fixations for attractiveness and body fat clustered in the central and upper abdomen and chest, but not the pelvic or hip areas, consistent with the finding that WHR had little influence over attractiveness judgments. 2) The pattern of fixations for attractiveness ratings was very similar to the fixation patterns for body fat judgments. 3) The fixations for WHR ratings were significantly different from those for attractiveness and body fat.

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

“…4). This is consistent with previous literature that the waist-hip is an important determinant of attractiveness (Singh, 1993) and women attend to the mid and lower torso when assessing attractiveness (Cornelissen et al, 2009). However, Cornelissen et al (2009) also found women gazed frequently at the chest, another region important for attractiveness (Singh & Young, 1995), whereas we found no differences between viewing time at the upperbody and leg regions.…”

“…This discrepancy might be caused by the clothing. The body's chest area was modestly covered in our study (even in the tight clothing condition), but was nude in Cornelissen et al (2009) which might draw more attention to this area.…”

“…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).…”

Gaze patterns to child figures reflect deviant sexual preference in child sex offenders—a first glance

“…We chose to focus our analysis on these two regions as previous research has demonstrated they are the most crucial for eliciting differences in sexual preference in heterosexual men. Specifically, men gaze sooner and longer at these regions when viewing adult female stimuli (Cornelissen et al, 2009;Dixson, Grimshaw, Linklater, & Dixson, 2011;Hewig et al, 2008). However, when viewing images of males there is no difference in gaze allocation to these regions (Hall et al, 2011(Hall et al, , 2012.…”

“…In support of this, previous research has demonstrated that differences in waist-hip ratios and breast sizes influence attractiveness judgments (Connolly, Slaughter, & Mealey, 2004;Furnham, Swami, & Shah, 2006;Furnham, Tan, & McManus, 1997), which can also be evidenced by differences in gaze towards these regions. For example, Suschinksy, Eilas and Krupp (2007) found that men judged figures of a lower waist-to-hip ratio as more attractive, and also dedicated more gaze to the upper-body and waist-hip regions of these figures when compared to figures with higher waistto-hip ratios, and Cornelissen, Hancock, Kiviniemi, George and Tovee (2009) showed that men and women tend to gaze at the stomach and chest region when making attractiveness judgments.…”