Sex Differences during Visual Tracking and Emotion Recognition

Aims: To test cognitive sex differences in a visual tracking task. We hypothesize that males show a bias for bottom-up strategy during the tracking task, while females use more of a top down strategy during tracking.
Study Design: Cognitive sex differences typically favor males in visual tracking tasks while females exhibit an advantage in object recognition tasks, including recognition of emotional expressions. Many studies have attributed these advantages to strategies and biases for deploying bottom-up information processing by males and top-down processing by females. These biases have implications for the concept of dorsal and ventral visual streams and their roles in spatial representation and embodied cognition.
Place and Duration of Study: Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, between September 2011 and June 2013.
Methodology: We used a computer task that measures accuracy and reaction times in visual tracking and emotion recognition tasks using slow and fast trials. Three different types of trials were presented: visual tracking only, emotion recognition only, and combined visual tracking and emotion recognition, in which trials were randomly presented.
Results: In the visual tracking task males performed with greater accuracy, although not necessarily faster than females. In the emotion recognition task, males and females performed with equal accuracy, but females improved their performance in the combined task, whereas males did not. Reaction times showed that all participants reacted faster and more accurately in the fast compared to slow speed trials, suggesting a role for embodied representation of stimulus speed.
Conclusion: The overall pattern of results is consistent with and extends previous work implying that sex-related biases in low-level visual processing play an important role in the expression of cognitive sex differences.