Checking out the competition: Women spend more time ogling other females than their male partners do



When it comes to checking out competition women should not worry about men checking them out - but women instead.

That is according to research carried out which suggests women ogle the bodies of other women for far longer than their male partners do.



University researchers discovered that while men stare at the faces of people in photographs and fine art paintings, women are more interested in looking at their breasts.



Checking out the competition: When it comes to ogling women, research suggests it is other females who spend more time staring than men

In heterosexual couples shown a photo or a painting of a man and a woman, both preferred to look at the female form, but women ‘checked out’ the figure, whereas men tended to stare at the face.



Boffins at the University of Bristol examined eye movement and found women looked in fewer places when presented with an image, but focused mainly on the female form.

Men, on the other hand, made many more eye movements, scanning the entire image, but paused only to stare at faces rather than breasts.

The new findings prove that women in a relationship are much more interested in checking out other women than their men are.

Felix Mercer Moss, PhD student in the Department of Computer Science who led the study, said: 'The study represents the most compelling evidence yet that, despite occupying the same world, the viewpoints of men and women can, at times, be very different.

In the research men also tended to spend less time focusing on women's breasts than other females did

'Our findings have important implications for both past and future eye movement research together with future technological applications.'

The University of Bristol researchers suggest that men and women look at different things because they interpret the world differently.



Women have an increased sensitivity to any threats to their relationship, and therefore instinctively ‘check out’ any other women they see.



Men, on the other hand, are more likely to make direct eye contact, rather than stare at a nude model’s breasts, because it is the best way to detect any possible threat or danger.



The report concludes: 'Women and men are different.

'As humans are highly visual animals, these differences should be reflected in the pattern of eye movements they make when interacting with the world.

Results: The research was carried out at Bristol University, which monitored people's eye movements

'The most striking of these was that women looked away and usually below many objects of interest, particularly when rating images in terms of their potency.



'We also found reliable differences correlated with the images’ semantic content, the observers’ personality, and how the images were semantically evaluated.



'While men and women may live in the same environment, what they see in this environment is reliably different.



'Our findings have important implications for both past and future eye movement research while confirming the significant role individual differences play in visual attention.'

