Sex differences in the duration of visual attention

Abstract

Attentional behavior has been a topic of interest to psychology since the last half of the nineteenth century. Recent research has demonstrated that the duration of visual attention depends upon stimulus, environmental, and subject variables. It has, for example, been shown that free looking time (the time S spends viewing a stimulus when he can look at it for as long as he wishes) depends upon stimulus complexity (Berlyne, 1957(Berlyne, , 1958aCantor, Cantor, & Ditrichs, 1963;Leckart & Bakan, 1965), stimulus novelty (Berlyne, 1958a; Cantor & Cantor, 1964a, b;Leckart, 1966), the instructions given S (Brown & Farha, 1966), E's behavior (Martin, 1964), E controlled stimulus presentations (Leckart, Keeling, & Bakan, 1966), and degree of schizophrenic withdrawal (McReynolds, 1963).Other studies indicate that at least some individual differences in attention are due to the interaction between subject and stimulus variables. Interaction effects have, for example, been demonstrated with subject variables of "spontaneous sexual behavior" (Rosenzweig, 1942), sex (Brandt, 1945), homosexuality (Zamansky, 1956), paranoia (Zamansky, 1958), heterosexual interpersonal contact (Christiansen, 1961), and extraversion . Brandt (1945) had male and female Ss view a single visual target, containing three separate pictures of men and three separate pictures of women. The time spent looking at each picture was recorded with an eye movement camera. The results indicated that male Ss looked longer at pictures of women than at pictures of men, but that female Ss did not differentially attend to the stimuli. However, because only six pictures were used, the possibility exists that sex of the picture was confounded with one or more other stimulus variables.In a similar study, Zamansky (1956) found that overt male homosexuals showed a stronger preference for male pictures and a stronger avoidance' of female pictures than normal males. But, no conclusions were drawn about the normal males per se , although there was a tendency for these Ss to look longer at female than male pictures. This study was designed to further investigate sex differences in the duration of visual attention by presenting a large sample of male and female pictures to normal male and female Ss in a situation where they could look at the pictures one at a time. By presenting the stimuli successively, instead of simultaneously as had previously been done, the tendency to attend to one stimulus would not be confounded with the tendency to avoid a second stimulus. Assuming that normal Ss are attracted to the opposite sex, and that attending to the opposite sex is socially, if not biologically reinforced, it was expected that Ss would spend relatively more time attending to pictures of members of the opposite sex than to pictures of their own sex. METHOD SubjectsThe Ss were 25 females and 27 males selected from the introductory psychology course at Michigan state University. ApparatusThe stimuli consisted of 40 black and white photographs selected from national magazines. Ea...