Biological Sex Determines Whether Faces Look Real

Overview

Journal Vis cogn

Specialties Neurology
Psychology

Date 2013 Nov 19

PMID 24244103

Citations 4

Authors

Benjamin Balas

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Judging whether a face is real or artificial can be done relatively rapidly and accurately, even when visual information is substantially impoverished. The perception of animacy in the face also has several interesting properties that may reflect both the underlying "tuning" of face space to preferentially represent real face appearance and the diagnosticity of individual features for categorizing faces as animate or inanimate. In the current study, we examined how sex categories interact with animacy perception by separately characterizing animacy judgments as a function of stimulus sex. We find that stimulus sex affects subjective ratings of animacy and sex categorization of real and artificial faces. Specifically, female faces look more artificial and artificial faces look more female. We discuss our results in terms of the ecology of real and artificial faces and the possible role of visual experience with artificial female faces, and the objectification of female faces.

Citing Articles

What is So Special About Contemporary CG Faces? Semiotics of MetaHumans.

Giuliana G Topoi (Dordr). 2022; 41(4):821-834.

PMID: 36039188 PMC: 9403949. DOI: 10.1007/s11245-022-09814-0.

Perceiving Animacy in Own-and Other-Species Faces.

Balas B, Auen A Front Psychol. 2019; 10:29.

PMID: 30728795 PMC: 6351462. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00029.

Rapid Facial Reactions in Response to Facial Expressions of Emotion Displayed by Real Versus Virtual Faces.

Philip L, Martin J, Clavel C Iperception. 2018; 9(4):2041669518786527.

PMID: 30023041 PMC: 6047257. DOI: 10.1177/2041669518786527.

Artificial faces are harder to remember.

Balas B, Pacella J Comput Human Behav. 2015; 52:331-337.

PMID: 26195852 PMC: 4505187. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.06.018.

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