Eyetracking study reveals that men look at crotches.

[BigBearJohn]

Among the many interesting things in Online Journalism Review's article about using eyetracking to increase the effectiveness of news article design is this odd result:



Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed. Coyne adds that this difference doesn't just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.

That is absolutely fascinating. I've love to hear an evolutionary biologist's take on why that is.

I'm also heartened by the article's first featured finding: that tighter writing, more white space, and jettisoning unnecessary imagery helps readers read faster and retain more of what they've read.

http://www.kottke.org/07/03/men-look-at-crotches

[JeffR]

1. My take: the men were just checking for pine tar

[Norrin Radd]

2. Is that what infravision looks like?

Sorry! Geeky joke.

[133724]

3. I just want to know how big Dick Cheney is... N/T

[leftofthedial]

4. did joe morgan draw that

with the little tellustrator thingy?

[majorjohn]

7. no, KSM did n/t

[Igel]

5. Tx.

You link to an excised bit of a larger article: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070312ruel/

Now, the crotch fixations (if that's what they are, there's at least one alternative explanation that needs to be zonked) are interesting. But the rest of the article is interesting.

First, one image (with fairly consistent red blobs across the top of a webpage) shows that people scan a page with the same distance between fixations. I knew that people hopped around; it's nice that they do it in essentially the same way.

Second, the business about photos is also fascinating: people apparently take a short fixation to ID a photo and then move to something more 'interesting' than models or ads.

It's meaningful for editors and writers, for people in graphic design, for textbook writers, and also for webpage designers. I knew one psycholinguist a few years ago (she's now at NC-Chapel Hill). She was big into eyetracking methologies for getting at real-time processing of language--it's a really neat way of figuring out what people's brains are doing without their knowing it. Anyway, her husband worked for a large software corporation testing and refining their webpages and software screen layout. Things were known about how people looked at pages since the '90s, but I'm fairly sure at that time he wasn't into using eyetracking. At some point in the recent past he probably turned to his wife and said, "Ok, this eyetracking stuff ... let me in." Eh, only $50k or so for the full set-up.

on edit: why look at crotches? Well, if you're male you certainly want to know a person's sex ... ok, pretty much everybody's. For a few reasons. First, sex. If you're straight, you look at crotches: Got package? If yes, move on; if no, check out sexual object a bit more. The second reason is that men tend to compete with men: You scan a person, examine crotch ... he's male, and a competitor, both sexual and other. (The other option--much less likely, I think--is that guys check out the other person a bit more thoroughly; women look at faces and upper chest to see what they want, men want more info: by looking at face/upper chest and crotch they can form a pretty good mental representation of everything from mid-thigh up, and what's happening from the knees down is pretty useful information. To disambiguate you'd need to have images so large that two fixations, one face-level and the other crotch-level, wouldn't let the observer have the entire or nearly entire torso in focus.)

[semillama]

13. Might tie into some cultural expressions such as codpieces

and penis gourds.

[ComerPerro]

6. I'm not looking at his crotch! I was just, uh, examining his batting stance.

[annabanana]

8. lol. . .BUSTED, you guys...

Born with inadequacy issues..
You poor things.

[mitchtv]

9. I was just checking Barry Bonds to see if

the juice made "everything" grow

[leftchick]

10. well they didn't test me

:)

[gatorboy]

11. I thought that was the sniffing test.

[CTyankee]

12. No, that comes much later. My husband says women DO look at crotches.

I think women believe that they "shouldn't" be interested in them. The hell with that...

[matt819]

14. Another take

It would be interesting to see if the same assessment would be made if the photos were of individuals clothed differently, or not on their own. For example, what about a group picture? What about men dressed in suits or casual sports clothing. Or photos of people of different physiques. Drawing a conclusion on what men or women tend to fixate on based on their response to one individual in on type of photos is a little weak. Just a thought.