3 ms·

Hmm. I'm at a loss to explain how hormones, in the retina of all places, would affect perceptual cues that have been built up over years and years of use and ar

Hmm. I'm at a loss to explain how hormones, in the retina of all places, would affect perceptual cues that have been built up over years and years of use and are in many ways hard coded into the many layers and blobs (yes, "blobs") of visual cortex. I certainly can't rule it out, but it seems an unlikely mechanism for me. The neural networks governing vision are a very powerful combination of nature (some blobs fire only when there are edges of a certain orientation, for instance) and nurture (motion parallax ties in closely with a physical understanding of distance, proprioception, etc). The differences have to be deeper, if you ask me. Men and women's brains are indeed different, in ways we don't fully understand (this is an understatement), but there's a lot of evidence that men have, if you will, a spaciality speciality. I wonder if there's a whole proprioceptive feedback center that helps tally your visual input with your movements, that's fed by androgens or otherwise activated by male-dominated chemicals and structures. However I'm also curious about controls for things like playing lots of games when younger — we're only just now starting to see female gamers approach males in proportion, and I'm not confident that near-equality is as near when you look at 5, 10, 15 year olds. Especially games like FPSes with lots of 3D movement and rectifying of a virtual space with the real one. Having grown up with the motion of gaming, I think I'm less susceptible to VR sickness. I don't have any data on this, of course, but I would be very interested to see some.

pervycreeper 13y ago
>it seems an unlikely mechanism for me I was struck by the same thought. The fact that this woman has a PhD, and has been thinking about this problem for 17 years, and still produces something like this that is so thin on substance and so saturated in rhetoric says something, which I find to be rather discouraging.
hrktb 13y ago
The article is definitively thought provocking. About the influence of 3D games, if women/low androgene people take different visual cues, wouldn't there be the same effect that with virtual reality? IMO 3D games for instance are also heavy on parallax and poor on color and shadow rendering, their players would self select for being able to mainly rely on these, while other people would be mildly put off (eventually without understanding clearly what's happening, and think that they're just not into games)
lnanek2 13y ago
Doesn't seem very surprising. It's a common assertion that males are better with spatial tasks in order to make them better at hunting while women are better at color detection to make them better at gathering and identifying things like ripe fruit when gathering. It's pretty common to see certain animals that have very little color capability, but good motion detection. This is just a hormonal switch for that, which makes sense, if genders were once indicative of roles. It doesn't seem to far off from visual input to encourage shade detection vs. motion detection.
hyperion2010 13y ago
A just so story for you. Historically male primates of the genus homo have been hunters, often operating on terrain with features at various depths passed through on the go. To construct an accurate representation of the the natural world and the relative distances of objects it would thus be beneficial for the male retina to spend more resources processing depth cues that arise from motion parallax compared to women for who survival may not have depended on being able to accurately discern distances of game moving through brush. This story is just that, a story. But the biology underlying sexual dimorphism of the visual system is definitely real and the fact that a sex hormone is involved may not be surprising since if, for example, an androgen receptor is expressed in a certain cell type in the retina and that cell type is in the circuit for parallax depth perception and that receptor enhances the response to differential parallax by say, depolarizing that specific cell type, then only males will have that enhancement.

pervycreeper 13y ago

>it seems an unlikely mechanism for me I was struck by the same thought. The fact that this woman has a PhD, and has been thinking about this problem for 17 years, and still produces something like this that is so thin on substance and so saturated in rhetoric says something, which I find to be rather discouraging.

hrktb 13y ago

The article is definitively thought provocking. About the influence of 3D games, if women/low androgene people take different visual cues, wouldn't there be the same effect that with virtual reality? IMO 3D games for instance are also heavy on parallax and poor on color and shadow rendering, their players would self select for being able to mainly rely on these, while other people would be mildly put off (eventually without understanding clearly what's happening, and think that they're just not into games)

lnanek2 13y ago

Doesn't seem very surprising. It's a common assertion that males are better with spatial tasks in order to make them better at hunting while women are better at color detection to make them better at gathering and identifying things like ripe fruit when gathering. It's pretty common to see certain animals that have very little color capability, but good motion detection. This is just a hormonal switch for that, which makes sense, if genders were once indicative of roles. It doesn't seem to far off from visual input to encourage shade detection vs. motion detection.

hyperion2010 13y ago

A just so story for you. Historically male primates of the genus homo have been hunters, often operating on terrain with features at various depths passed through on the go. To construct an accurate representation of the the natural world and the relative distances of objects it would thus be beneficial for the male retina to spend more resources processing depth cues that arise from motion parallax compared to women for who survival may not have depended on being able to accurately discern distances of game moving through brush. This story is just that, a story. But the biology underlying sexual dimorphism of the visual system is definitely real and the fact that a sex hormone is involved may not be surprising since if, for example, an androgen receptor is expressed in a certain cell type in the retina and that cell type is in the circuit for parallax depth perception and that receptor enhances the response to differential parallax by say, depolarizing that specific cell type, then only males will have that enhancement.