Gender and Visibility of Sexual Cues Influence Eye Movements While Viewing Faces and Bodies

Abstract

Faces and bodies convey important information for the identification of potential sexual partners, yet clothing typically covers many of the bodily cues relevant for mating and reproduction. In this eye tracking study, we assessed how men and women viewed nude and clothed, same and opposite gender human figures. We found that participants inspected the nude bodies more thoroughly. First fixations landed almost always on the face, but were subsequently followed by viewing of the chest and pelvic regions. When viewing nude images, fixations were biased away from the face towards the chest and pelvic regions. Fixating these regions was also associated with elevated physiological arousal. Overall, men spent more time looking at female than male stimuli, whereas women looked equally long at male and female stimuli. In comparison to women, men spent relatively more time looking at the chests of nude female stimuli whereas women spent more time looking at the pelvic/genital region of male stimuli. We propose that the augmented and gender-contingent visual scanning of nude bodies reflects selective engagement of the visual attention circuits upon perception of signals relevant to choosing a sexual partner, which supports mating and reproduction.

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder: An Initial Investigation of the Effects of Alcohol, Attractiveness, Warmth, and Competence on the Objectifying Gaze in Men

“…Tassinary and Hansen 1998), rather than less provocative cues like their faces. Consistent with this idea, when presented with scantily clad and nude women, men bias their fixations away from faces, focusing more on bodies (Lykins et al 2008;Nummenmaa et al 2012;Wenzlaff et al 2015). The present work builds on this prior work by examining the role of alcohol intoxication in predicting objectifying gazes toward provocatively dressed women.…”

Gender differences in the neural underpinning of perceiving and appreciating the beauty of the body

“…Previous studies have shown that men and women show comparable esthetic preference for the same features of either male or female bodies, valuing especially thinness (Brown & Slaughter, 2011;Cornelissen et al, 2009) and movement quality (Grammer et al, 2003;McCarty et al, 2013) as important markers of attractiveness. However, using eye-movement recording during observation of whole body pictures, other studies (Nummenmaa et al, 2012;Smith et al, 2007) have shown important differences in the specific body parts that men and women use when they evaluate opposite-gender models. In particular, both women and men tend to spend more time looking at the body of opposite-than same-gender models; however, women tend to concentrate fixations onto the head area of male models, while men tend to fixate onto the bust and buttocks areas of female bodies, in keeping with the notion that the bust-waist ratio may provide a useful cue to reproductive potential and thus influence attractiveness judgments of female bodies (Jasienska et al, 2004).…”

Where Do You Look Visual Attention to Human Bodies across the Weight Spectrum in Individuals with Normal Weight or with Obesity

“…Greenhouse-Geisser-corrected values will be reported in the case of sphericity violation. As there was only a small number of men included in the sample, but gender differences are documented regarding body image [21] and the processing of body stimuli [22,23], we conducted each analyses with and without male participants. The conduction of comparative analyses between genders was not possible because of the small number of male participants.…”