Where is this recollection of a ‘study’ coming from?
July 25, 2013 3:56 PM   Subscribe

I seem to recollect an eye tracking experiment comparing the female body parts prioritised by men and the male body parts prioritised by women when looking at a stranger. Where is this recollection coming from? What is this study?

I realise I am being vague here. In fact, it is one of the biggest mysteries in my life. And where better to ask than MetaFilter.

I seem to recollect once watching a video clip about an eye tracking experiment done at a bar. This could have been on TV, on YouTube, or just randomly on the internet.

The eye study was based on tracking what body parts people looked at when checking out strangers. The subject was seated in (at?) the bar while random people are coming and going all the time. The subjects eyes would wander at the people that entered the bar and this ‘glancing’ would be recorded.

Both male and female subjects were used.

I believe one of the interesting tit-bits that came out of this to be women looking at men’s pelves. This stuck with me and I have throughout the years mentioned this to friends whenever they accuse men of leering. But without citation they are (understandably) doubtful of my claims.

So there you have it. I am looking for a study that may or may not exist in video form and may or may not be published about. This alleged study would have used eye tracking in a public place to see what male body parts women look at and vice-versa.

Do you know what experiment I am talking about? This is a big case of [citation needed].
posted by Martijn to Science & Nature (8 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I thought women saw the person as an integrated whole rather than as a collection of parts (as the men did). I have a vague recollection of the same study.

update: in the study I remember, both sexes saw women as parts and men as people. sounds like a different study than what you're thinking of.

http://newsroom.unl.edu/blog/?p=1202
posted by jpe at 4:09 PM on July 25, 2013


There was a documentary within the BBC's QED strand in the 1980s which showed footage of people from their pov using a camera to follow their gaze. Could it be that?
posted by biffa at 4:20 PM on July 25, 2013


Here is a study that indicates that looking at faces comes first, followed by men looking at breasts and women looking at legs. You might also look at some of the previous studies cited there.
posted by freezer cake at 4:32 PM on July 25, 2013


It's not a video, but the Business Insider has a listicle of a bunch of different eye tracking studies/results.
posted by Jem and the Hooligans at 6:06 PM on July 25, 2013


This documentary includes eye tracking when looking at nude bodies of the opposite sex.
posted by MinusCelsius at 1:09 AM on July 26, 2013


Response by poster:
[biffa: …] BBC’s QED […] showed footage of people from their pov using a camera to follow their gaze. Could it be that?
It could be. The recollection is so vague it could be anything. Would you happen to know what episode I should look for? If it was from Q.E.D. it must definitely be on the internet as I wasn’t alive in the 80’s to watch such a thing.
[Jem and the Hooligans …] the Business Insider has a listicle of a bunch of different eye tracking studies/results.
Interesting. A lot of those have to do with advertising though and is at such very different from ‘checking out’ strangers at a public place. The closest one mentioned there is the Think Eye Tracking experiment featuring a man and woman in swimwear. (Now bookmarked for posterity.)

A similar experiment would be the whitepaper ‘Men are pervs, women are gold diggers’ by Miratech which also shows that women look at the clothing and men and the body. Interesting, but not what I was looking for.
[MinusCelsius:] This documentary includes eye tracking when looking at nude bodies of the opposite sex.
Very interesting. The actual eye tracking part is here (NSFW). It uses a very limited sample though in a non-natural environment. It does show that women also focus on the pelvic area: hips and waists. Good find!

jpe: that was one of the things that came up a lot when using the major search engines to find what I was looking for. It is interesting but not really my goal here.

freezer cake: nice find. I haven’t had the time to go through all the references there yet but it’s a good start. The paper itself does not add very much to the debate and looks to be a reiteration of the fact that (through clothing) humans have adapted to read much from the face rather than the body.

Thanks everyone for trying to help me out!

The reason this specific experiment stuck around was that is was done in a real live situation (a bar) rather than eye tracking on pictures. This gave a much better idea of what people look at when they are looking for e.g. dates.
posted by Martijn at 4:15 AM on July 26, 2013


Hmm. I watched a bunch of Science of Sex Appeal clips a while ago, once which (I think) featured eye-tracking -- but I don't remember it in a bar for that part.

(Also, if I remember the clips correctly, some of the studies behind them were a bit ambiguous, but they do name researchers in them.)
posted by Dimes at 9:28 AM on July 26, 2013


I don't know the specific QED episode and I can't find a complete list online, however, thinking about it, it strikes me that I have seen something more recently that made me think, 'hey, that is just a rip off of a QED episode from the 80s', so you may have something more recent in mind.
posted by biffa at 3:42 AM on July 28, 2013


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