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Watching the Hourglass

Eye Tracking Reveals Men’s Appreciation of the Female Form

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Abstract

Eye-tracking techniques were used to measure men’s attention to back-posed and front-posed images of women varying in waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). Irrespective of body pose, men rated images with a 0.7 WHR as most attractive. For back-posed images, initial visual fixations (occurring within 200 milliseconds of commencement of the eye-tracking session) most frequently involved the midriff. Numbers of fixations and dwell times throughout each of the five-second viewing sessions were greatest for the midriff and buttocks. By contrast, visual attention to front-posed images (first fixations, numbers of fixations, and dwell times) mainly involved the breasts, with attention shifting more to the midriff of images with a higher WHR. This report is the first to compare men’s eye-tracking responses to back-posed and front-posed images of the female body. Results show the importance of the female midriff and of WHR upon men’s attractiveness judgments, especially when viewing back-posed images.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Linklater lab group for providing helpful feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript. We also thank five anonymous reviewers for helpful and detailed comments on the manuscript. B. J. Dixson was funded by an Education New Zealand International Doctoral Scholarship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand

    Barnaby J. Dixson, Wayne L. Linklater & Alan F. Dixson

  2. School of Psychology, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand

    Gina M. Grimshaw

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  1. Barnaby J. Dixson
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  4. Alan F. Dixson
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Correspondence to Barnaby J. Dixson.

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Dixson, B.J., Grimshaw, G.M., Linklater, W.L. et al. Watching the Hourglass. Hum Nat 21, 355–370 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-010-9100-6

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