Visual Acuity in Males vs Females

            On February 25, Dr. Yael Granot presented her research on the effect of visual acuity, selective attention, and social identification on the perception of video evidence in the court room. She demonstrated that visual cues are more trusted than any other senses, even though these cues may be incorrect. She also explained that when a participant strongly identified with one of the subjects in the video evidence, the participant was more likely to punish or not punish that subject. When these researchers told the participants to pay attention to all aspects of the video, there was no statistical difference in terms of strong or weak identification. Her goal is to inform and implement new strategies to get these biases out of the jury.

            After listening to this presentation, I was curious if visual acuity and perception vary by sex. The article “Sex-Related Differences in Vision are Heterogenous,” the researchers recruited 200 healthy participants and administered 10 different visual acuity and perception measures. These researchers determined that males outperformed females on 5 of the 10 tests: reaction time, visual acuity, visual backward masking, motion direction detection, and the Ponzo illusion.

            Not only does visual acuity depend on one’s background, selective attention, and social identification, but also on sex. I found this research very interesting because it is not something that trained professionals can really control for in the court room, and the legal system cannot count females out of the jury. I would like to see more research done on sex-related visual differences, how this research can play into refining the use of video evidence in court, and how they would manage the discrepancy between males and females.

Shaqiri, A., Roinishvili, M., Grzeczkowski, L., Chkonia, E., Pilz, K., Mohr, C., Brand, A., Kunchulia, M., & Herzog, M. H. (2018). Sex-related differences in vision are heterogeneous. Scientific reports, 8(1), 7521. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-25298-8

Granot, Y., Balcetis, E., Feigenson, N., & Tyler, T. (2018). In the eyes of the law: Perception versus reality in appraisals of video evidence. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 24(1), 93.