We're just scanning for the bear...

https://lemmy.world/post/43457616

Study visually captures hard truth: Walking home at night is not the same for women

An eye-catching new BYU study shows just how different the experience of walking home at night is for women versus men.

News

I’m not buying that heatmap data. Why are almost all the dots on the left red? That would mean that women pick a random spot and focus on that for an extended period of time before moving on to the next. This is not really how you’d investigate a scene. The right images are much more believable to me: Short glances at random points to get an overview of the scene and then re-investigating points of interest.

I am a man, though. Women: Do you really stare random points into oblivion?

Considering how common and easy eye tracking is, this seems like some shitty science.
whaaaat surely BYU, the school that claimed to have done cold fusion, is an upstanding pillar of academic research
i hate defending byu, but wasn’t that UofU?
UwU?
Energy from nuclear fusion? Utah has been there, not done that

Scientists in California report that they have produced energy from nuclear fusion, something the University of Utah claimed 33 years ago but failed to prove.

The Salt Lake Tribune
I recently watched a BobbyBrocolli video on it, the controversy mostly surrounded UofU, a quick search shows that Pons and Fleischman are from UofU. The video also mentioned that BYU also claimed to discover cold fusion, but not the energy of the future self sustaining kind.
i must have missed ybu’s announcement. no worries, there have been a lot of hoaxes in that area.
This would be the perfect use case for that fancy Apple VR headset they released a year or two so. Since it has built-in eye tracking, it would be easy to set up a test in a controlled environment where participants navigate it while looking around.
Navigating that scene in real life (or even simulated) would make the data orders of magnitude more annoying to interpret. On a static image you can just overlay all eye movements and produce a heatmap. But for a subject that’s actually (or virtually) moving, none of the data would coincide and you’d have to manually find out which focus points were actually equal.
Put the subject in an auto driving kart and make it go in same path for all of them
Sure, but any decent webcam and monitor can do this.
I feel like utilizing eye tracking would be used if they were to study this concept more deeply. That data would be more complicated to sift through given how much data and how many variables might come into play. Definitely more telling but also harder to analyze.
How so?
We're just scanning for the bear... - Sopuli

Lemmy

Thanks. But you can use eye tracking on static images with just a good webcam on a monitor.

Also in a live environment, presumed static (no people or traffic etc) image stabilization tech makes things much simpler.

Shitty science at BYU? Surely not!
Study designed around a conclusion using a borderline invalid method.

I’m not buying that heatmap data.

In the article they note that they participants were shown photos and told to click on areas that caught their attention. The results show that women paid more attention to the periphery. No eye tracking, no long focus.

[researches] asked [participants] to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention.

Then the different-colored dots make even less sense. And why are there fringes?

Seems like a seriously flawed study, doezn’t it, asking people to point to what’s interesting is NOT AT ALL the same as tracking their eyes.

We could actually track their eye movement by using special glasses. Just call your study what it actually is, ffs… don’t confuse the data.

Isn’t it like a video game, where you look to where people might be hiding?
…also, it has to do with attention on photos rather than real world going home experiences.

As a woman, imagining situations like those: I can see the brightly lit center is empty, that’s all I need to know about it. The stairs require several glances especially if I’m in heels or other unstable shoes. But those dark corners need checking and rechecking the whole time I’m walking, to be sure no tiny changes betray a lurker. Who is probably going to wait until they’re at my back to make a move.

My mental image of the guys scanning the same image: “Yeah that’s where I’m going, that’s obviously where I’m looking.” Sure, they could get mugged but it’s less likely, and physical threat isn’t on their mind.

My point wasn’t that women aren’t looking at the surroundings, but that they don’t do it as is portrayed in the image. You said it yourself: “checking and rechecking the whole time” That doesn’t match singular hotspots, but rather a more spread-out heatmap with peaks at certain positions.

Sure, they could get mugged but it’s less likely This is completely untrue, men are (and always have been) the primary target of random violence such as mugging. According to FBI crime statistics it’s hugely disproportional year after year. Women are disproportionately victimized by their intimate partners, both male and female. Both of these facts are beyond tragic but it is, in my opinion, really important to get these things straight. Women are more likely to scream for help when they are being robbed which leads them to being de-prioritized when violent criminals are choosing their targets. Men tend to submit, and are likely to avoid reporting it due to shame, so the disparity is probably significantly higher than the already gigantic reported disparity.

Hope you don’t see this as me just trying to stir shit cause I’m not. It just really irks me to see that sentiment repeated even though it’s entirely unsubstantiated. I’m a man of small stature and a minority. With awareness of the reality of the situation, the threat of physical violence is literally always on my mind. I’ve had a solid handful of random encounters in public that very nearly turned violent and it causes me pretty severe anxiety.

Don’t know why I felt like typing a novel over this, like I said though I guess I just find it frustrating. I can’t talk to my female friends about this, they just laugh at me. They talk about it like I’m wholly immune to violence by virtue of being male when it couldn’t be further from the truth.

I was mugged in the playground of my building, the street across fine my house, my lobby, and at 57th and suttton, all in Manhattan. Then a few more times when I lived in Baltimore. I really hope most women don’t get raped that often.
I hope you’ve started scanning the dark periphery like we do. Not because you deserved anything that happened to you! And I’m not assuming you weren’t already. But because I can’t do anything to protect you from over here on the Internet and I don’t want that to happen to you anymore. It’s when we’re near home that we tend to let our guard down.
Thank you. I’ve taken a much more holistic approach. It’s worked very well. Haven’t been mugged in decades.
they picked a location on campus widely known among the student body for people getting raped. i was warned as a freshman during orientation not to go there after dark.
Um. Holy shit. How does a known place on campus not get corrected immediately.
that’s the neat thing! they expel the students who get raped, not the rapists.
Yeah, what this data actually shows is that, in the situations tested, women tend to find darker areas of a picture more interesting and men tend to find lighter areas more interesting. Not as interesting of a headline though. I’m interested to see what the actual paper says, not some click bait pop-sci meme.

To your edit: The dots do make sense.

This is an overlay of every participant. So if 100 women clicked in the same 10 places, for instance, they would be red. While places 50 women clicked would be yellow.

Also, even if this was eye tracking of one person, it could still make sense. Red != 100%. Red is the place where the most time was spent looking. So of 1s was spent on all the dots, and everywhere else was less than 1s, then red. Comparing it to the male chart is what makes it seem off, but the comparison of color doesn’t matter, it’s the math.

I think their question was why would all the women click the same ten random places rather than spread the heat map out more broadly along the dark area?
Exactly, thanks.

Ahh, that’s more clear then, sorry!

Heat map images were analyzed using canonical correlation (Rc) to determine the relationship between the two groups; dispersion testing to decipher spatial uniformity within the images; the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) to characterize the nature of image patterns differences; and, the Breslow–Day Test to specify pattern locations within images.

www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/…/vio.2023.0027

Basically:

  • n women clicked somewhere on the bush
  • The bush is officially located at coordinates x/y
  • Place heat map point (circle) n times at x/y (the bush)

@[email protected]

That’s why I can never find anything and have to ask my girlfriend for help. I’m bad and scanning the periphery.
Well, a man who scanned the periphery would come across as shifty (“what’s he looking for? is he some kind of voyeur or predator? he’s not staring at that girl’s tits, is he, the creep?”), so looking straight ahead is kind of like keeping one’s hands where everyone can see them. Though granted the absence of likely threats would also have an influence.
Was going to say nearly the same. We’re conditioned to always fabricate a guise of confidence and the body language you give off ‘scanning the periphery’ comes off as the opposite of that.
TIL i’m a woman
🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵

“Why can’t we live in a world where women don’t have to think about these things? It’s heartbreaking to hear of things women close to me have dealt with,” Chaney said. “It would be nice to work towards a world where there is no difference between the heat maps in these sets of images. That is the hope of the public health discipline.”

I’m not convinced this phenomenon would disappear in a world where women don’t have to think about these things. It could be an evolutionary psychology thing. Would have to repeat the experiment in different societies and environments to find out.

This could also be evolutionary… Imagine 2 cavemen walking through a forest. The woman scans the periphery while the male focuses ahead. It may be an evolutionary thing.
Men are better at detecting motion. I would bet men are better at detecting motion in their perephiral vision too.
Men and women show surprising differences in seeing motion

A new UW-led study shows that males and female process visual motion differently, a variation that may be attributable to a neural regulatory process that is different in the male brain.

UW News
Right… peripheral vision in general is better at motion, but shit for details. It’s why sacchads happen seemingly at random; often something is signalled in the periphery, so the individual glances in that direction.

Also, another thing to consider is whether there’s other people around and what their gender is. Consider the scenario of me (a man) walking down the street at night and there’s one person around that I need to pass by to get where I’m going.

If I’m constantly moving my head to look around at everything, I’m going to look really shady and make other people worried. I’m just trying to get somewhere, so I’d rather not bother people, which means it’s better to just look ahead and kinda ignore them, and trust that my peripheral vision will pick up any actual threats.

I don’t trust Mormon findings until they are peer reviewed.
Until you learn the peers reviewing are more Mormons.
Mormons only consider other Mormons peers, so that checks out.

Men and women also navigate differently. Men navigate tend to by direction and women tend to navigate by landmarks. I suppose looking around helps to find those important landmarks.

I always wonder if women were the gathers becuase of how they navigate and look around, or were women the gathers becuase they could navigate by landmark and tend to look aound alot?

please do not get me started on how my mother gives directions she always includes turning at some animal. you know, those animate things that have lives and can move and not be there when i drive by.

it all started because she watched O Brother Where Art Thou and she thought “you will see a cow on a roof” was funny, and it was, and then she saw a goat with a hat on it on a drive to someplace and she was turning there and told everyone to turn at the goat with the hat. guess who was not there when everyone else was driving by oh gods i got started

Alright yall, experiment time.

Go bird watching. Or squirrels. Something hard to spot that moves quickly.

Scan the treeline, or instead fixate on a point straight ahead. Do what comes naturally first, then the opposite. What method “spots” the motion first?

See what method works better for you. Hope it helps!

I ride a motorcycle… When I was doing the MSF training (after riding illegally for years), I kept getting dinged for not turning my head to look into a turn. Thing is, I have excellent peripheral vision. I can see 90° to either side when I’m looking straight ahead - so I tend to keep my gaze straight ahead regardless of where my attention is…
yeah, i got dinged on my driver’s test for not turning my head to look. because my eyes can rotate in their sockets, something the examiner did not consider.

Its been years since I took the course, but I believe one of the reasons for turning your head into a turn is “balance”. It basically recenters yourself into the turn.

The other is not all helmets are made the same. Some are going to restrict your vision more than others.

The other reason is it communicates to other people in the environment.
If they’re paying attention, which I would never assume…
MSF?
Motorcycle Safety Foundation. They do rider training, then when you complete it it counts as your road test when you add the motorcycle endorsement to your license.