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Associations Among Gender-Linked Toy Preferences, Spatial Ability, and Digit Ratio: Evidence from Eye-Tracking Analysis

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Eye-tracking technology was used to monitor eye-movements in 64 adults (age range, 18–22 years) during simultaneous presentation of “masculine” and “feminine” toys. Women and men who showed more visual fixations on male-typical toys compared to female-typical toys had significantly better targeting ability and smaller (i.e., more masculine) digit ratios, a putative marker of prenatal androgen levels. In contrast, individuals with visual preferences for female-typical or male-typical toys did not differ in mental rotations ability and in their retrospective reports of childhood gender-linked activities. The finding that targeting ability and digit ratios varied according to visual preferences for gender-linked toys suggests that prenatal androgens promote enduring preferences for male-typical objects and indicate further that some gender-linked traits vary according to the direction of a visual preference for gender-linked toys. Visual preferences derived from eye-tracking, therefore, may be a useful supplement to current measures of psychosexual differentiation in hormone-behavior research, particularly because eye-movements are not dependent on verbal abilities or subjective evaluations of behavior.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author thanks Milagros Evardone for valuable assistance in data collection and Mark G. Packard, the Editor, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grant MH071414.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

    Gerianne M. Alexander Ph.D.

  2. Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, TAMU-4235, College Station, Texas 77845, USA

    Gerianne M. Alexander Ph.D.

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Alexander, G.M. Associations Among Gender-Linked Toy Preferences, Spatial Ability, and Digit Ratio: Evidence from Eye-Tracking Analysis. Arch Sex Behav 35, 699–709 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-006-9038-2

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