Gender differences have been shown on a variety of motor coordination tasks.¹ Tasks emphasizing gross motor ability, such as blocking and catching balls, favor males, whereas tasks emphasizing fine motor ability, such as quick placing of pegs in holes, favor females.

Little is known about the mechanisms underlying these differences as the tasks that have been studied are complex and difficult to break down into component parts. We have employed an oculomotor pursuit task, along with accompanying psychophysical tasks, allowing us to differentiate mechanisms that might contribute to performance in complex tasks. We report on the precision of smooth pursuit² following the initial saccade to a moving target as a measure of pursuit performance.

We find an overall male advantage of over one standard deviation, one of the largest sex differences reported to date. The males in our study do not perceive the speed of moving stimuli more precisely, nor do they begin to move their eyes sooner, nor do they move their eyes at a consistently higher speed. Thus the difference appears to be one specifically of pursuit precision, and not of perceptual precision, quickness to respond, or strength of motor response. For the future it is important to ask whether this difference in oculomotor precision might underlie male advantages seen in gross motor performance.

1. Kimura D. (1999) Sex and cognition. MIT Press.

2. Kowler, E. & McKee, S. P. (1987) Vision Research, 27, 993-1015.