Greater Female Variability in Human Colour Perception

As a biological variable, sex has received wide attention in recent research on human colour vision. However, sex differences in variability in colour vision have seldom been investigated in prior research. In this paper, by revisiting our previous studies including 7 colour discrimination tests and 20 experiments on colour preference assessment, we found distinct greater female variability in human colour vision. Such a result was different from previous studies in other domains where greater male variability (GMV) hypothesis was frequently advocated, which indicated that the mechanisms of sex differences in variability may differ among different cognitive or perceptual process. We would like to highlight the necessity of considering variability rather than only considering the central tendency in future visual perception research.