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Broad conclusions for a study conducted on a population of ~500 undergrad students at a single religious university in one city of one state of one country.
I look mostly at the ground to avoid stepping on dog poo.
Edit: looks like the study was not done using eye tracking and was instead done with pictures:
https://news.byu.edu/intellect/study-visually-captures-hard-truth-walking-home-at-night-is-not-the-same-for-women <- news thing
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/vio.2023.0027 <- paper
Participants were given 16 images and asked to consider walking alone through the place in the picture. Using the Qualtrics heat map tool, they were instructed to imagine themselves walking through these areas and to click on the area(s) of the image that stood out to the most to them.
Source: the research article paper I linked above
Also, even if it was done with some type of eye tracking glasses, if you knew you were taking part in a study, would you be worried about what might happen, in comparison to how worried you are normally? Like I’m not gonna be worried about someone sneaking up on me if I know I’m being observed and more likely to be safe, so naturally I’d be more relaxed. I imagine the same applies for other people.
Yeah I’m a hard ground starer too. But def scanning periphery when not looking down. Especially at night when it’s most dangerous but I’ve always avoided going outside at night as much as possible.
I wouldn’t be looking at any of that, where’s the smartphone showing dumb memes?
As a somewhat paranoid person, you better believe I ain’t looking just straight ahead, even as a man. You never know who is nearby, waiting to confront you for any reason.
I don’t trust Mormon findings until they are peer reviewed.
Until you learn the peers reviewing are more Mormons.
I’m not buying that heatmap data. Why are almost all the dots on the left red? That would mean that women pick a random spot and focus on that for an extended period of time before moving on to the next. This is not really how you’d investigate a scene. The right images are much more believable to me: Short glances at random points to get an overview of the scene and then re-investigating points of interest.
I am a man, though. Women: Do you really stare random points into oblivion?
Edit:
Ok, at first I thought this was actual eye tracking information. However,
[researches] asked [participants] to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention.
Then the different-colored dots make even less sense. And why are there fringes?
As a woman, imagining situations like those: I can see the brightly lit center is empty, that’s all I need to know about it. The stairs require several glances especially if I’m in heels or other unstable shoes. But those dark corners need checking and rechecking the whole time I’m walking, to be sure no tiny changes betray a lurker. Who is probably going to wait until they’re at my back to make a move.
My mental image of the guys scanning the same image: “Yeah that’s where I’m going, that’s obviously where I’m looking.” Sure, they could get mugged but it’s less likely, and physical threat isn’t on their mind.
…also, it has to do with attention on photos rather than real world going home experiences.
Considering how common and easy eye tracking is, this seems like some shitty science.
whaaaat surely BYU, the school that claimed to have done cold fusion, is an upstanding pillar of academic research
This would be the perfect use case for that fancy Apple VR headset they released a year or two so. Since it has built-in eye tracking, it would be easy to set up a test in a controlled environment where participants navigate it while looking around.
Navigating that scene in real life (or even simulated) would make the data orders of magnitude more annoying to interpret. On a static image you can just overlay all eye movements and produce a heatmap. But for a subject that’s actually (or virtually) moving, none of the data would coincide and you’d have to manually find out which focus points were actually equal.
Put the subject in an auto driving kart and make it go in same path for all of them
Sure, but any decent webcam and monitor can do this.
I feel like utilizing eye tracking would be used if they were to study this concept more deeply. That data would be more complicated to sift through given how much data and how many variables might come into play. Definitely more telling but also harder to analyze.
How so?
Thanks. But you can use eye tracking on static images with just a good webcam on a monitor.
Also in a live environment, presumed static (no people or traffic etc) image stabilization tech makes things much simpler.
[researches] asked [participants] to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention.
Then the different-colored dots make even less sense. And why are there fringes?
Seems like a seriously flawed study, doezn’t it, asking people to point to what’s interesting is NOT AT ALL the same as tracking their eyes.
We could actually track their eye movement by using special glasses. Just call your study what it actually is, ffs… don’t confuse the data.
I’m not buying that heatmap data.
In the article they note that they participants were shown photos and told to click on areas that caught their attention. The results show that women paid more attention to the periphery. No eye tracking, no long focus.
It’s probably 1 click = blue, right? The more clicks overlap at a certain point the closer to red.
And all women telepathically agreed on which exact pixels to click?
Theres probably variation from the background there, that drives clicks to that particular spot. Several of the red-female locations have blue-male dots at the same spot.
Isn’t it like a video game, where you look to where people might be hiding?
“Why can’t we live in a world where women don’t have to think about these things? It’s heartbreaking to hear of things women close to me have dealt with,” Chaney said. “It would be nice to work towards a world where there is no difference between the heat maps in these sets of images. That is the hope of the public health discipline.”
I’m not convinced this phenomenon would disappear in a world where women don’t have to think about these things. It could be an evolutionary psychology thing. Would have to repeat the experiment in different societies and environments to find out.
Alright yall, experiment time.
Go bird watching. Or squirrels. Something hard to spot that moves quickly.
Scan the treeline, or instead fixate on a point straight ahead. Do what comes naturally first, then the opposite. What method “spots” the motion first?
See what method works better for you. Hope it helps!
I ride a motorcycle… When I was doing the MSF training (after riding illegally for years), I kept getting dinged for not turning my head to look into a turn. Thing is, I have excellent peripheral vision. I can see 90° to either side when I’m looking straight ahead - so I tend to keep my gaze straight ahead regardless of where my attention is…
TIL i’m a woman
🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵
Men are better at detecting motion. I would bet men are better at detecting motion in their perephiral vision too.
Right… peripheral vision in general is better at motion, but shit for details. It’s why sacchads happen seemingly at random; often something is signalled in the periphery, so the individual glances in that direction.
I must be a woman cause I too am always looking around. But I get why women have to do this. Same reason they rather run into a bear in the woods rather then a man. It’s fuck up but just proves as a collective us men need to do better.
That’s why I can never find anything and have to ask my girlfriend for help. I’m bad and scanning the periphery.
Men and women also navigate differently. Men tend to navigate by direction and women tend to navigate by landmarks. I suppose looking around alot as a woman helps find those important landmarks.
I always wonder if women were the gathers becuase of how they navigate and look around, or were women the gathers becuase they could navigate by landmark and tend to look aound alot?
Well, a man who scanned the periphery would come across as shifty (“what’s he looking for? is he some kind of voyeur or predator? he’s not staring at that girl’s tits, is he, the creep?”), so looking straight ahead is kind of like keeping one’s hands where everyone can see them. Though granted the absence of likely threats would also have an influence.
