Exploring the contribution of motivation and experience in the postpubescent own-gender bias in face recognition.

Abstract

The own-gender bias in face recognition has been hypothesized to be the result of extensive experience with own-gender faces, coupled with a motivation to process own-group faces more deeply than other-group faces. We test the effect of experience and motivation in four experiments employing standard old/new recognition paradigms. In Experiment 1, no own-gender recognition bias was observed following an attractiveness-rating encoding task regardless of school type (single- or mixed-sex). Experiment 2, which used a distinctiveness-rating encoding task, did find a significant own-gender bias for all groups of participants. Experiment 3 on adults found that the own-gender bias was not affected by self-reported contact with the other-gender, but the encoding task did moderate the size of the bias. Experiment 4 revealed that participants with an own-gender sexual orientation showed a stronger own-gender bias. These results indicate that motivational factors influence the own-gender bias whereas no evidence was found for perceptual experience. (PsycINFO Database Record

Correlations between holistic processing, Autism quotient, extraversion, and experience and the own-gender bias in face recognition

“…Further, there is no empirical evidence that making gender salient increases the OGB (in the same way that making gender salient can lead to stereotype threat effects, [68]). However, Hills et al's [31] data do indicate that anything that might increase motivation to process own-gender faces more deeply enhances the OGB, therefore it is possible that the presence of the social contact questionnaire actually enhances the presence of the OGB in our study relative to those that use a more neutral distractor.…”

“…Distinctiveness was measured by participants responding to the question, "How easy would this face be to spot in a crowd?" [67], using a Likert scale ranging from 1 (difficult—i.e., typical face) to 9 (easy—i.e., atypical) This judgement was carried out as it is a gender-neutral form of encoding [31]. Between each face a grey mask was presented in the centre of the screen where the face would appear for 600 ms.…”

“…Evidence for the involvement of experience in the OGB is not convincing: Wolff, Kemter, Schweinberger, and Wiese [30] found no correlation between self reported daily contact with faces of the opposite gender and expert processing (see also [31], who also measured objective experience due to schooling). While early interactions are usually female dominated [32, 33] and this might lead to a bias, subsequent peer interactions in middle childhood [34] are usually same-sex [35].…”

Contour-as-Face Framework: A Method to Preserve Privacy and Perception

“…The participants were asked to provide ratings only if they did not know the individuals depicted in the images; they were also allowed to decide how many images to rate. To eliminate potential own-gender perception bias (Hills et al 2018), we used only those ratings for face images of the opposite gender (about half of the total ratings collected) in the subsequent data analysis. Our conclusions were not qualitatively different when all ratings were included.…”

“…Therefore, we asked participants to provide ratings for any of the 15 dimensions they found interesting and were able to rate using facial contours. 2 The participants in the contour group were shown only contour images of the opposite gender to avoid own-gender perception bias (Hills et al 2018). On average, each participant rated 25.9 contour images of the opposite gender.…”