A new study has revealed that women are better than men at recognizing living things and men are better than women at recognizing vehicles.
Vanderbilt psychologists performed an analysis on data from a series of visual recognition tasks collected in the process of developing a new standard test for expertise 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,” she said.
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.”
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