title: Gender differences in recognition of toy faces suggest a contribution of experience.
abstract: When there is a gender effect, women perform better then men in face recognition tasks. Prior work has not documented a male advantage on a face recognition task, suggesting that women may outperform men at face recognition generally either due to evolutionary reasons or the influence of social roles. Here, we question the idea that women excel at all face recognition and provide a proof of concept based on a face category for which men outperform women. We developed a test of face learning to measures individual differences with face categories for which men and women may differ in experience, using the faces of Barbie dolls and of Transformers. The results show a crossover interaction between subject gender and category, where men outperform women with Transformers' faces. We demonstrate that men can outperform women with some categories of faces, suggesting that explanations for a general face recognition advantage for women are in fact not needed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA.
authors.forename: Kaitlin F
authors.initials: KF
authors.lastname: Ryan
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA. Electronic address: Isabel.gauthier@vanderbilt.edu.
authors.forename: Isabel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Gauthier
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010988:Play and Playthings; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012737:Sex Factors; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Experience; Face recognition; Gender differences; Learning