Evidence review – Science Daily
20 NOVEMBER 2013 – SCIENCE DAILY
Numerous studies have reported that women outperform men when it comes to face recognition faces, but most have focused on assessing innate biases in favor of race, gender, and age. Now a major literature review concludes that, in the majority of tests, women are better at face recognition than men, irrespective of all other factors.
In order to test the often-cited theory that women are better at recognizing faces than men, psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Johanna Lovén of the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, have compiled a detailed ‘meta-analysis’ of over 140 existing facial recognition studies. They conclude:
“Our review of the literature … clearly showed that girls and women remembered more faces than boys and men did, irrespective of [the] age of participants. We also found that, in studies using both male and female faces, girls and women remembered more female faces than boys and men did, but not more male faces. However, girls and women outperformed boys and men in [the] recognition of male faces when only male faces were included in the test material.”
The theory that women are better at recognizing, discriminating between, and interpreting facial expressions dates back to the 1970s, and many studies have reported that women outperform men on face-recognition tasks. Women have also been found to outperform men across a number of to-be-remembered materials, such as recall and recognition of words, pictures of objects, and object location. Moreover, there is even evidence that this skill develops in infancy. For example, studies of newly born infants found that girls attended more to a female face than infant boys, whereas boys attended more to a moving object, such as a mobile.
Despite a considerable volume of research on the topic of facial recognition, most studies to date specifically address facial recognition from the perspective of various known biases for race, age, and gender. Herlitz and Lovén therefore set out to test the generalizability of women’s advantage over men in face recognition.
Their literature review, published in the journal Visual Cognition, scoured published data (including advance online publications) up to May 2013 and encompassed papers on the presence and magnitude of:
- the sex difference in face recognition;
- the sex differences in face recognition of male and female faces; and
- the own-gender bias for males and female faces.
In total, more than 140 papers were assessed. These comprised not only ‘conventional’ behavioral studies, but also the physical effects on the brains of test participants by measuring the Blood Oxygen Level-dependent (BOLD) response using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans….