Looking More and at Different Things: Differential Gender Eye-Tracking Patterns on an Irony Comprehension Task

Irony is a well-studied figurative form of communication that requires the interpretation of the pragmatic aspects of language and ability to infer another's mental state. Currently, the models that have been created to explain the process of verbal irony are not unanimous, which could be because of the choice of stimulus materials (written and auditory sentences). In real-life situations, a verbal irony statement is placed in a social context with multiple sources of cues that help integrate the correct meaning. Another important issue in verbal irony studies involves sex differences that are observed in the frequent use of this figurative form of communication. Again, the integration of social cues could constitute the core of these differences. Thus, we investigated the way in which these cues are integrated when participants are presented with an ironic statement and the way in which the integration of these cues can affect sex differences in the use of this complex form of communication. We constructed 20 sequences of cartoons that portrayed ironic and literal situations. Each situation had 3 cues, called areas of interest (i.e., facial expression, written commentary, and pictorial cue). We analyzed eye-movement patterns among genders, indexed by the duration and number of fixations and sequence of fixations for each scenario. Our results indicated that although women presented an increase in the number of fixations compared with men, both genders presented similar behavioral performance in the task. We found that both genders were equally capable of grasping the ironic meaning. Therefore, both genders were equally capable of inferring another's mental state using different strategies.