Sex difference in Joint Attention: evidence from extreme male brain theory using eye tracking

Previous studies have shown that variety of cognitive weakness and strengths in the autism population, moderately considered in male as male brain, in which males typically recording lower performance than females on some cognitive functions such as social communication, empathy, etc. Although, Joint attention function takes a main role in social cognition and communications, this function is frequently absent in autism individuals. This study aimed to evaluate whether sex have different accomplishment effect in various features of gaze patterns during an eye-tracking measure of joint attention. Task performance (accuracy to correctly label a target item) and eye movement information (‘where’ the participant fixates when completing the task) were recorded among males and females. Fifty seven (32 female, 25 male) students of Shahid Beheshti University, based on available sampling in year 2013-2014 were recruited in the study. The results showed different gaze patterns between males and females. Also, males had longer duration time of searching the target and looking at the face in comparison with females. These results further supports the hypothesis that joint attention could be an important element of extreme male brain (EMB) theory, in which males recording lower performance than females.