{"id":2255,"date":"2015-11-24T23:36:09","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T04:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=2255"},"modified":"2017-06-27T13:22:46","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T17:22:46","slug":"sisterhood-in-the-face-of-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2015\/11\/24\/sisterhood-in-the-face-of-it-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Sisterhood in the face of it all!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"female<\/a>

female faces<\/p><\/div>\n

What is your thought process when you see someone\u2019s face for the first time? This is a tough question, and quite honestly I could not think of anything specific myself. Upon perceiving a face, it only takes us a few seconds to cognitively process it and gather all the necessary information about it. For something so seemingly easy and quick, one would not expect any difference between how different people perceive and process faces, right? Wrong. What if I told you that women processed males and female faces differently? If you are a woman like myself, you are probably puzzled, as you probably never had a difficult time recalling and identifying faces of your peers regardless of their gender. Evidence suggests that women are better at remembering female faces than they are at remembering male faces. In the paper titled \u201cWomen Own-gender Bias in Face Recognition Memory: the role of attention at encoding,\u201d researchers investigated the role attention played in women\u2019s ability to better remember faces of fellow females than faces of males.<\/p>\n

\"male<\/a>

male faces<\/p><\/div>\n

What do faces, written language, and your daily salad have in common? They are all patterns, meaning that they are complex sets of observable changes in our environment that are detected by our senses and allow us to make sense of the world around us. I am pretty sure that you don\u2019t have to remind yourself what your friends look like before you meet up with them for your night out. The reason why it is not necessary is because, once you have perceived and processed a series of information (can be visual, tactile, or auditory), it is stored in memory and we are usually able to remember things we have interacted with. Faces are special because research has shown that there are regions of the brain dedicated solely to recognizing, identifying, and categorize faces, while other patterns do not seem to have regions dedicated to them.<\/p>\n

This matters because researchers have observed a phenomenon known as the own-gender bias in women. Remember that time you genuinely confused someone from another race with someone else of that same race or when your parents swore that your two friends of a different race looked exactly the same? Yeah, we have all been there and this is known as own-race bias. In cognitive psychology, own-race bias is defined not being able to differentiate between faces of people of a different race. The own-gender bias observed in women\u2019s ability to recognize faces of their own gender better is modeled after biases like the own-race bias. However, while the own-race show reciprocity between the different groups, the own-gender bias is observed only in women, as men do not show an own-gender bias.<\/p>\n

One theory to explain this phenomenon is that women have greater perceptual expertise for female faces. Evidence shows that infants process female faces better than they process male faces. Babies are able to differentiate between female faces long before they acquire that skill for male faces. This can be explained by the fact that babies interact a lot with their caregivers who are mostly women. Women had to process female faces frequently from an early age and that accounts for the expertise demonstrated when recognizing and remembering the female face. In their early days, men interact mostly with women but as they grow they start interacting with more men. The result is that they did not have enough time with either gender to develop a bias like the women\u2019s own-gender bias.<\/p>\n

When discussing how we process information from our environment, attention is usually considered a relevant factor. Attention defines the amount of cognitive resources dedicated to any task at hand we are attending to. On one hand, when you allot all your attention to one task referred to as full attention condition, you are expected to perform better on the task. On the other hand, when your attention is divided between multiple tasks at once, you are expected to not perform as well as you could and that is the divided attention condition. Therefore, researchers hypothesized that maybe women were better at remembering and recalling female faces because they devoted more attention to processing them when they first perceived these faces.<\/p>\n

In order to test this theory, male and female research participants were presented neutral faces, while simultaneously performing another equally important task demanding their attention. Three experiments were conducted with different participants. In the first experiment, 70 women and 64 men were presented neutral faces at a full attention condition and presented face while performing a digit-monitoring task for the divided attention condition. The digit-monitoring task required them to report aloud when they heard a target number presented in a stream of 81 numbers. In a second experiment, 47 men and women participated in the test. They were also presented neutral faces in a full attention condition and also presented faces while also attending to a digit-monitoring task. The main difference form experiment 1 was that participants were asked to write down the target digits when they were heard from the stream of numbers being presented over loud speakers. In the third experiment, the experimenters wanted to account for floor effects, meaning that they wanted to ensure that the concurrent task participants carried out in experiments 1 and 2 were not too difficult as to cause everyone to score on the lower end of scale. 80 men and women research participants were presented faces, asked to monitor 2 specific target digits, and make a dash when they heard the targets.<\/p>\n

Across all three experiments, they found that women remembered more female faces than male faces overall, while males did not seems to remember face form their gender more than face from the opposite gender. Women\u2019s tendency to remember more female faces was not affected by the amount of attention they had to dedicate to the distractor in the divided attention conditions. These results show that the women\u2019s own gender bias is not a result of more arduous encoding of female face. It appears to be the result of a better encoding of female faces than male faces by women, even when processing conditions are not ideal. Furthermore, men did not show significant own-gender bias, regardless of encoding conditions.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, the own-gender bias observed in women is not a product of more effortful processing as evidenced in this study. It is believed that women are just experts at recognizing the female face. Although undivided attention is crucial when processing new information, experts can bypass this requirement as they have unlimited resources through past experiences, memory traces, and rehearsals that allow them to make the most of limited information. The fact that men do not show own-gender bias is interesting in that it give us some insight into selectiveness of cognitive processing. So, next time the you or males in your life have a hard time differentiating between your girlfriends, remember: it is not easy being a guy out here.<\/p>\n