Imagine walking across your college campus at night, a low-visibility situation. As you walk along, what areas of the image stand out most to you? Imagine tapping on the spots of the image where you’d be focusing your eyes during your walk.

Where do you think most people would be looking?

Researchers at Brigham Young University recently conducted a version of this task on college students and were surprised to find that men and women tapped on different parts of the photo. The findings suggest that they scan their environments differently. The gender differences were fairly strong. Their university published a press release about the findings.

Read some of the study’s details so you can apply your research methods content.

[the study’s researchers showed photos] to participants and asked them to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention. Women focused significantly more on potential safety hazards — the periphery of the images — while men looked directly at focal points or their intended destination.

“The resulting heat maps represent perhaps what people are thinking or feeling or doing as they are moving through these spaces,” Chaney said. “Before we started the study, we expected to see some differences, but we didn’t expect to see them so contrasting. It’s really visually striking.”

Click over to the press release to see how the patterns differed. (You won’t regret it! The photos tell a strong story)

Questions
a) At least according to the heat maps presented on the press release, the study’s effect size seems to be large enough to detect with the naked eye. Explain why this is a large effect size, using language to describe the overlap of the male and female heatmaps

Nearly 600 individuals took part in the study, published recently in the journal Violence and Gender, with 56% of participants being female and 44% being male. Each participant looked at 16 images and were told to imagine themselves walking through those areas. They used a Qualtrics heat map tool to click on the areas of the image that stood out the most to them.

While men tended to focus on the path or a fixed object (like a light, the walking path or a garbage can), the women’s visual pattern represented a scanning of the perimeter (bushes, dark areas next to a path).

b) Ask a question about this study’s external validity (hint: Don’t talk about the size of the sample…)

c) Ask a question about the construct validity of this study, specifically, the construct validity of their heat map technique.

d) This was a correlational study. Can you explain why?

e) The authors claim that women’s heatmaps include more peripheral information because women are more aware of safety issues. That is certainly a strong explanation for these data. But, a critic might wonder if women are more likely than men to scan any scene–not just walking paths on campus–more broadly.  How might a future study from this lab rule out this alternative explanation?  How would you design this study and what results would you expect?

The team published their findings in the journal, Violence and Gender.