The reason girls are not as good at catching as boys may have finally been explained, according to a controversial study likely to divide the sexes.
In a ‘surprising’ finding, researchers showed that men pick up on visual motion significantly faster than women.
They found that both sexes are good at reporting whether black and white bars on a screen are moving to the left or to the right.
But, in comparison to men, women took about 25 to 75 per cent longer to make the determination.
The findings show that men have better reaction times than those of the fairer sex and therefore have better hand-eye coordination, suggesting men are better at catching a ball or fast moving object in the real world.
People who perform well at the task have also been linked to people who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and depression.
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The researchers, based at the University of Washington, found that both sexes required only a tenth of a second – and often less – to make the right call.
The study had a total of 263 participants split into three groups.
Cohort one included 18 males and 15 females from 18 to 30 years of age, the second group had 25 males and 28 females from between 18 to 59 years of age while the third group had 61 males and 116 females ranging in age from 18 to 30 take part.
All participants had good vision and reported themselves to be either male or female.
The researchers say that although men had a quicker perception of motion, it may not necessarily transfer through to having better visual processing skills.
It is believed the cerebral processes that down-regulate neural activity are disrupted in people with depression and ASD, resulting in a quicker reaction time.
It is speculated that a similar reason could be behind the rapid response times of males.
Study co-author Professor Scott Murray said the results were highly unexpected.
‘We were very surprised. There is very little evidence for sex differences in low-level visual processing, especially differences as large as those we found in our study,’ he said.
The reason girls are not as good at catching as boys may have finally been explained, according to a controversial study likely to divide the sexes. In a ‘surprising’ finding, researchers showed that men pick up on visual motion significantly faster than women (stock)
Professor Murray and colleagues were not using the visual motion task to find a difference between the sexes, they were originally intending to study processing differences in individuals with ASD.
The reason they stumbled across the gender difference was because ASD has a known sex bias, with boys being about four times more likely to be diagnosed with the condition than girls.
As a result, they accounted for sex as a factor in their statistical analysis for individuals in the study who didn’t have ASD.
The findings then revealed the difference between the sexes in the control group – the section of people who do not have ASD.
Women regularly took about 25 to 75 per cent longer to make the determination between whether the vertical lines were moving left or right
People who perform well at the task have also been linked to people who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and depression. Researchers were not using the visual motion task to find a difference between the sexes, they were originally intending to study processing differences in individuals with ASD
To confirm the findings, the researchers asked other investigators who had used the same task in separate experiments for additional data with larger numbers of study participants.
The independent data confirmed the same pattern.
Experts say that the observed difference in visual perception can’t be explained by general differences in the speed of visual processing, overall visual discrimination abilities or potential motor-related differences.
Any differences in the morphology and functionality of the brain was not revealed in functional MRI images.
In further studies, the researchers hope to discover the underlying differences in the brain that may explain the discrepancy between men and women.
The full findings were published in the journal Current Biology.