Mental Health

Men and Women See Things Differently

By Drishya Nair | Update Date: Sep 04, 2012 09:14 AM EDT

While It is known that the brains of men and women work differently and perceive differently, like in choices and emotions, there is also a difference in the visual centers of the brains, a new study claims.

According to researchers from Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges of the City University of New York, men apparently are more sensitive to fine details of rapidly moving visuals while women are experts at discriminating colors. So, in matters of choosing color women are better. But men are good at spotting small  normally missed by women, like a moving ball in a baseball match.

The brain contains high concentrations of androgen (male sex hormone) receptors in the cerebral cortex, especially in the visual cortex where processing of the images takes place, Medical Xpress reported.

Androgens control the development of neurons in the visual cortex during embryogenesis which means men have 25 percent more neurons than women.

For the study, the researchers compared the vision of men and women above 16 years of age from college and high school. The participants included students and staff whose vision was normal and had a 20/20 sight, with or without glasses.

The volunteers were asked to describe colors shown to them across the visual spectrum and it was found that men required a slightly longer wavelength to experience the same hue that the women could see.

It was also found that had a broader range in the center of the spectrum was difficult for the men to discriminate color differences.

In order to measure contrast-sensitivity functions (CSF) of vision, the researchers used an image of light and dark bars- either horizontal or vertical.

For this test, the volunteers were asked to choose what they saw. The images appeared to ficker when the light and dark bars were alternated each time.

It was found that by varying the speed with which the bars were alternated or the distance between them, at moderate speed, observers lost the sensitivity for close together bars, and grew more sensitive when the bars were farther apart.

However, when the speed was faster, both sexes were less able to resolve the images over all bar widths, the report said.

Overall, men were found to be better resolvers of rapidly changing images that were closer together, when compared to women.

"As with other senses, such as hearing and the olfactory system, there are marked sex differences in vision between men and women. The elements of vision we measured are determined by inputs from specific sets of thalamic neurons into the primary visual cortex. We suggest that, since these neurons are guided by the cortex during embryogenesis, that testosterone plays a major role, somehow leading to different connectivity between males and females. The evolutionary driving force between these differences is less clear," Prof Israel Abramov, the lead author of this study commented.

The study was published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biology of Sex Differences.

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