Sex Matters in women and men. “Men Recognize Cars and
Women Recognize Living Things Best, Psychological Analysis Finds”
Image source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1069414
Women are better than men at recognizing living things
and men are better than women at recognizing vehicles.
That is the unanticipated result of an analysis
Vanderbilt psychologists performed on data from a series of visual recognition
tasks collected in the process of developing a new standard test for expertise
in object recognition.
"These results aren't definitive, but they are
consistent with the following story," said Gauthier. "Everyone is
born with a general ability to recognize objects and the capability to get
really good at it. Nearly everyone becomes expert at recognizing faces, because
of their importance for social interactions. Most people also develop expertise
for recognizing other types of objects due to their jobs, hobbies or interests.
Our culture influences which categories we become interested in, which explains
the differences between men and women."
The results were published online on Aug. 3 in the Vision
Research journal in an article titled, "The Vanderbilt Expertise Test
Reveals Domain-General and Domain-Specific Sex Effects in Object
Recognition."
"Our motivation was to assess the role that
expertise plays in object recognition with a new test that includes many
different categories, so we weren't looking for this result," said
Professor of Psychology Isabel Gauthier. She directs the lab where
post-doctoral fellow Rankin McGugin conducted the study.
"This isn't the first time that sex differences have
been found in perceptual tasks. For example, previous studies have shown that
men have an advantage in mental rotation tasks. In fact, a recent study looking
only at car recognition found that men were better than women but attributed
this to the male advantage in mental rotation. Our finding that women are
better than men at recognizing objects in other categories suggests that this
explanation is incorrect."
Discovery of the sex effect in object recognition also
casts doubt on several studies that claim an individual's ability to recognize
faces is largely independent of his or her ability to recognize objects.
"Face recognition abilities are exciting to study
because they have been found to have a clear genetic basis," said Gauthier,
"and many studies conclude that abilities in face recognition are not
predicted by abilities in object recognition. But this is usually based on
comparing faces to only one object category for men and women."
It took the multi-category analysis to reveal that face
recognition abilities are correlated to the ability to recognize different
object categories for men and women. For example, men who are better at
recognizing vehicles also tend to be better at recognizing faces, while women
who are better at recognizing living things tend to be better at recognizing
faces.
The researchers modeled their new test after the
well-established Cambridge Face Memory Task, which effectively measures a
person's ability to recognize faces. After familiarizing themselves with a
number of images, participants are shown three images at a time -- one from the
study group and two that they haven't seen before -- and then are asked to pick
out the image that they had studied.
While one goal of the new study was to compare object and
face recognition skills, another goal was to develop a better way to measure
who has exceptional skills in one domain: how to find the experts in the
recognition of cars or birds or even mushrooms. To do this, the Vanderbilt
researchers reasoned that performance on any category of interest needed to be
compared to performance on many other categories, to ensure that the
self-proclaimed bird expert is not only better with birds than most people, but
also better with birds than with most other categories. So they designed the
new test with eight categories of visually similar objects: leaves, owls,
butterflies, wading birds, mushrooms, cars, planes and motorcycles.
To evaluate the new test, they administered it to 227
subjects -- 75 male and 82 female -- with a mean age of 23. When the results of
the entire group were analyzed, the researchers found that increasing the
number of categories revealed a large sex difference: Women proved
significantly better at recognizing living things while men were better at
recognizing vehicles. In addition, the researchers administered a face
recognition test to about half of the participants, which allowed them to
determine the correlation between vehicle recognition and face recognition in
men and the correlation between recognition of living things and faces in
women.
Vanderbilt post-doctoral fellow Jennifer Richler as well
as Grit Herzmann, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder
and Research Assistant Magen Speegle also contributed to the study.
The research was supported by the National Eye Institute
grants EYO13441-06A2 and P30-EY008126 and by the National Science Foundation's
Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center grant SBE-0542013.
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