Women’s Own-Gender Bias in Face Recognition Memory

Abstract

Women remember more female than male faces, whereas men do not seem to display an own-gender bias in face recognition memory. Why women remember female faces to a greater extent than male faces is unclear; one proposition is that women attend more to and thereby process female faces more effortfully than male faces during encoding. A manipulation that distracts attention and reduces effortful processing may therefore decrease women's own-gender bias by reducing memory for female faces relative to male faces. In three separate experiments, women and men encoded female and male faces for later recognition in full attention and divided attention conditions. Results consistently showed that women, in contrast to men, displayed a reliable own-gender bias. Importantly, the magnitude of women's own-gender bias was not reduced in divided attention conditions, indicating that it is not a result of effortful processing of female faces. We suggest these results reflect that women have greater perceptual expertise for female faces, facilitating recognition memory.

Greater visual averaging of face identity for own-gender faces

“…The owngender advantage in face recognition is generally explained in terms of differences in interest and motivation (McKelvie, Standing, St. Jean, & Law, 1993) or perceptual expertise (Lovén, Herlitz, & Rehnman, 2011). In the present article, we investigated whether the own-gender advantage would also be evident when observers had to indicate whether a test face had been present in a previously seen set of faces, and the face could be either a true set member or a morphed average of all set members.…”

“…Apart from methodological factors, what could explain the greater averaging for owngender faces? A speculative possibility is that any greater perceptual expertise for own-gender faces (Lovén et al, 2011) would lead to an increased tendency to use shortcut strategies such as visual averaging. On this view, the owngender bias often reported for face recognition (e.g., Cross et al, 1971) and the increased averaging effects found here may both be related to a greater familiarity with own-gender faces.…”

Orienting to face expression during encoding improves men's recognition of own gender faces

“…A recent meta-analysis by Herlitz and Lovén (2013) reported that women are better at recognizing faces (Hedges' g = .36), with the advantage seen primarily for female faces. Several explanations have been offered for women's advantage, such as their superior face perception (Megreya et al, 2011), greater self-reported social engagement (Sommer, Hildebrandt, Kunina-Habenicht, Schacht, & Wilhelm, 2013), increased encoding specificity of faces (Guillem & Mograss, 2005;Lovén, Herlitz, & Rehnman, 2011), and superior recognition or detection of facial expression (Hall et al, 2010). Women's face recognition may also benefit from better use of increased encoding time (McKelvie, 1981), higher circulating estradiol (Yonker et al, 2003) and own-gender faces (Herlitz & Lovén, 2013;Lewin & Herlitz, 2002;Lovén, Svärd, Ebner, Herlitz, & Fischer, 2014;Lovén et al, 2011;McKelvie, 1981;Megreya et al, 2011;Wolff, Kemter, Schweinberger, & Wiese, 2014;Wright & Sladden, 2003).…”

Normative data for accuracy and response times at the computerized Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT-c)

“…Some studies showed that females perform better than males at face processing tasks (e.g., Bowles et al, 2009;Heisz, Pottruff, & Shore, 2013;McBain, Norton, & Chen, 2009;Megreya, Bindemann, & Havard, 2011;Rehnman & Herlitz 2007;Sommer, Hildebrandt, Kunina-Habenicht, Schacht, & Wilhelm, 2013), although this female advantage was not found in all studies, in particular in the original report of the BFRT (Benton & Van Allen, 1968). This advantage is also observed sometimes only in specific conditions (see Weirich, Hoffmann, Meißner, Heinz, & Bengner, 2011), could be specific for female faces (the so-called "female own-sex bias"; see e.g., Lewin & Herlitz, 2002;Lovén, Herlitz, & Rehnman, 2011;McKelvie, Standing, St Jean, & Law, 1993;Megreya et al, 2011) with a reversed effect occasionally reported for male faces (male observers better than female observers; see e.g., McKelvie et al, 1993).…”