It’s a shame this study appears to have been conducted so poorly, the topic is very interesting.
The study had people click on photos of where their interest would be if they were walking. They were not eye-tracked when actually walking. This is a significant difference. Particularly because at night your peripheral vision is much more acute at detecting shape/silhouette/tonal variation and in my experience also motion. The latter is very relevant for detecting threats.
I was poor growing up had to walk a lot, including at night. A lot of time was spent walking in not the best areas! Most of my teenage life seemed to be spent in the dark too, if I ever wanted to see friends! And then military service with endless night exercises. Add to that living in the UK with 17+ hours of darkness in the winter. I can definitely say that after decades of walking at night and many many thousands of miles (I have a nearly 200 already this year already) you learn there’s a certain way of ‘seeing’ without looking at something directly. So I very much question the claims of the study in so much as it states where your eyes actually look when walking in real world circumstances.
What I don’t doubt is that in general women have more to worry about and fear in public spaces, that their attention is drawn to different things than men in some circumstances and that there likely is a difference in scene scanning behaviour.
A proper study on this would be very interesting to see and might actually help better inform the design of public spaces for night time use.
I hope they make a follow up study with some kind of VR contraption. It would be also great to get a read of things like heart rate, blood pressure and things like adrenaline.
The study had people click on photos of where their interest would be if they were walking. They were not eye-tracked when actually walking. This is a significant difference. Particularly because at night your peripheral vision is much more acute at detecting shape/silhouette/tonal variation and in my experience also motion. The latter is very relevant for detecting threats.
I was poor growing up had to walk a lot, including at night. A lot of time was spent walking in not the best areas! Most of my teenage life seemed to be spent in the dark too, if I ever wanted to see friends! And then military service with endless night exercises. Add to that living in the UK with 17+ hours of darkness in the winter. I can definitely say that after decades of walking at night and many many thousands of miles (I have a nearly 200 already this year already) you learn there’s a certain way of ‘seeing’ without looking at something directly. So I very much question the claims of the study in so much as it states where your eyes actually look when walking in real world circumstances.
What I don’t doubt is that in general women have more to worry about and fear in public spaces, that their attention is drawn to different things than men in some circumstances and that there likely is a difference in scene scanning behaviour.
A proper study on this would be very interesting to see and might actually help better inform the design of public spaces for night time use.