Evidence on skill differences of women and men concerning face recognition

Abstract

We present a cognitive study regarding face recognition skills of women and men. The results reveal that there are in the average sizable skill differences between women and men in human face recognition. The women had higher correct answer frequencies then men in all face recognition questions they answered. In difficult questions, those which had fewer correct answers than other questions, the performance of the best skilled women were remarkably higher than the best skilled men. The lack of caricature type information (high spatial frequencies) hampers the recognition task significantly more than the lack of silhouette and shading (low spatial frequencies) information, according to our findings. Furthermore, the results confirmed the previous findings that hair style and facial expressions degrades the face recognition performance of humans significantly. The reported results concern 1838 individuals and the study was effectuated by means of Internet. © Springer-Verlag 2001.