Associations among gender-linked toy preferences, spatial ability, and digit ratio: evidence from eye-tracking analysis.
Eye-tracking technology was used to monitor eye-movements in 64 adults (age range, 18-22 years) during simultaneous presentation of "masculine" and "feminine" toys. Women and men who showed more visual fixations on male-typical toys compared to female-typical toys had significantly better targeting ability and smaller (i.e., more masculine) digit ratios, a putative marker of prenatal androgen levels. In contrast, individuals with visual preferences for female-typical or male-typical toys did not differ in mental rotations ability and in their retrospective reports of childhood gender-linked activities. The finding that targeting ability and digit ratios varied according to visual preferences for gender-linked toys suggests that prenatal androgens promote enduring preferences for male-typical objects and indicate further that some gender-linked traits vary according to the direction of a visual preference for gender-linked toys. Visual preferences derived from eye-tracking, therefore, may be a useful supplement to current measures of psychosexual differentiation in hormone-behavior research, particularly because eye-movements are not dependent on verbal abilities or subjective evaluations of behavior.
Alexander
Gerianne M
GM
Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77845, USA. gma@psyc.tamu.edu
D000328:Adult; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D007062:Identification, Psychological; D008297:Male; D010988:Play and Playthings; D012737:Sex Factors; D014796:Visual Perception