Men, Women, and Eyetracking

Have a look at the photos below for five seconds or so. We'll come back to them later.

Scientists have used eyetracking technology to see where people look in a photo. One question they have asked is whether men and women look at other people in the same way.

In one experiment, groups of men and women were asked to look at the picture of baseball player George Brett. 

The eyetracking heatmap shows that both men and women spent time looking at the head, but men also looked at the crotch. This isn't necessarily a sign of sexual attraction. They could be sizing up the competition or identifying with him.

According to Nielsen and Coyne, men also tend to look more at private parts of animals when shown American Kennel Club photos.

Here are the results of thirty men and thirty women looking without prompting at that first pair of photos.

The company Think Eye Tracking observes from the results:

1. Men check out other men, especially their "assets."
2. Women checked out his wedding ring.
3. Guys don't seem to care about the woman's marital status, but looked at her face, breasts, and stomach.
4. If you ask people to self-report where they looked, they tend not to be very honest or they're just not consciously aware.
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Read more:
Bathing Suit Photo Study (Think Eye Tracking)
Online Journalism Review
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