Same face may look male or female
BOSTON (UPI) -- Where a person sees a face within the person's field of view can determined whether the face is perceived as female or male, U.S. researchers say.
Lead author Arash Afraz, a post-doctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, and colleagues said they were surprised by their discovery.
"It's the kind of thing you would not predict: that you would look at two identical faces and think they look different," Afraz says in a statement.
Afraz says the finding challenges a longstanding tenet of neuroscience -- how the brain sees an object should not depend on where the object is located relative to the observer.
The study, published in the online edition of the Current Biology, reports patterns of male and female biases were different for different people. Some people judged androgynous faces as female every time they appeared in the upper right corner, while others judged faces in that same location as male.
Afraz and colleagues asked subjects to classify by gender a random series of faces -- ranging along a spectrum of very male to very female. The subjects were told to fix their gaze at the center of the screen -- as faces were flashed elsewhere on the screen for 50 milliseconds each.
Lead author Arash Afraz, a post-doctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, and colleagues said they were surprised by their discovery.
"It's the kind of thing you would not predict: that you would look at two identical faces and think they look different," Afraz says in a statement.
Afraz says the finding challenges a longstanding tenet of neuroscience -- how the brain sees an object should not depend on where the object is located relative to the observer.
The study, published in the online edition of the Current Biology, reports patterns of male and female biases were different for different people. Some people judged androgynous faces as female every time they appeared in the upper right corner, while others judged faces in that same location as male.
Afraz and colleagues asked subjects to classify by gender a random series of faces -- ranging along a spectrum of very male to very female. The subjects were told to fix their gaze at the center of the screen -- as faces were flashed elsewhere on the screen for 50 milliseconds each.
Copyright 2010 by United Press International
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