An own gender bias and the importance of hair in face recognition.
There is a large literature on the own race bias, the finding that people are better at recognizing faces of people from their own race. Here an own gender bias is shown: Males are better at identifying male faces than female faces and females are better at identifying female faces than male faces. Encoding a person's hair is shown to account for approximately half of the own gender bias when measured using hit and false alarm rates. Remember/know judgements and confidence measures are taken. Encoding a person's hair is critical for having a "remember" recollective experience. Parallels with the own race bias and implications for eyewitness testimony are discussed.
Wright
Daniel B
DB
Psychology Department, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK. danw@sussex.ac.uk
Sladden
Benjamin
B
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006197:Hair; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012737:Sex Factors; D014796:Visual Perception