Men better at distance vision due to hunter-gatherer past: study

Men are better at seeing things in the distance due to their hunter-gatherer past chasing animals, while women are better focusing on things at close range, a British study said Thursday.

In findings which reflect how men's and women's brains have evolved differently over thousands of years, they found that men are better at judging faraway targets.

Researchers tested their theory by asking a group of 48 men and women to use a laser pointer to mark the midpoint of lines on a piece of paper at different distances.

Men were more accurate than women when the paper was placed at a distance of 100 centimetres, while women were more accurate when the target was only 50 cms away, within arm's reach.

"Evidence already exists that separate pathways in the brain process visual information from near and far space," said psychologist Helen Stancey from Hammersmith and West London College.

"Our results suggest that the near pathway is favoured in women and the far pathway is favoured in men," she said, in a study published online in the British Journal of Psychology.

And she said: "These sex differences in visual processing may be a result of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary legacy.

"As the predominant gatherers, women would have needed to work well in near space, whereas the prey for (predominantly male) hunters would have been in far space."

(c) 2009 AFP