Face-n-Food: Gender Differences in Tuning to Faces

Faces represent valuable signals for social cognition and non-verbal communication. A wealth of research indicates that women tend to excel in recognition of facial expressions. However, it remains unclear whether females are better tuned to faces. We presented healthy adult females and males with a set of newly created food-plate images resembling faces (slightly bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style). In a spontaneous recognition task, participants were shown a set of images in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. Females not only more readily recognized the images as a face (they reported resembling a face on images, on which males still did not), but gave on overall more face responses. The findings are discussed in the light of gender differences in deficient face perception. As most neuropsychiatric, neurodevelopmental and psychosomatic disorders characterized by social brain abnormalities are sex specific, the task may serve as a valuable tool for uncovering impairments in visual face processing.