Gender Modulates Visual Attention to Emotional Faces: An Eye-Tracking Study

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder with a high prevalence in males. Most studies are based on the sample of male ASD individuals, which may lead to a bias in understanding female ASD individuals. Not only in the diagnostic characteristics but also the social cognitive performance, gender differences have been found in the ASD population, but the reason is still unclear. To explore whether gender differences are due to specific pathology of ASD or the different social attention between males and females, we collected behavioral and eye movement data from 48 typically developing (TD) adults during a facial emotion discrimination task. We analyzed the behavioral performance, gaze patterns, and pupillary responses during the emotional face processing between males and females. Results showed that the two groups had similar accuracy for facial emotion discrimination, but males spent more time. In addition, males preferred the mouth region while processing emotional faces. In contrast, females preferred to fixate on the eye region and had greater pupillary responses to this region than males. These findings suggest that males and females differ in their visual processing strategies and sensitivity to emotional faces, which may extend to the ASD population.