Abstract
A longer exposure time generally improves individuals’ ability to recognize faces. The current research investigates whether this effect varies between genders and whether it is influenced by the gender of the exposed faces. Based on a set of four experimental studies, we advance our knowledge of face recognition, gender, gender distribution of exposed faces, and exposure time in three main ways. First, the results reveal that women are more likely than men to suffer from a decrease in face recognition ability due to a lower exposure time. Second, the findings show that when exposure time is short (vs. long) women recognize a larger proportion of same gender faces and also recognize a larger proportion of same gender faces as compared with the proportion of same gender faces recognized by men. Third, findings reveal that when individuals are only exposed to same gender faces, women recognize more faces than men regardless whether exposure time is short, or long. In short, the findings of this research suggest that insight into the interplay between gender and exposure time length is critical to appropriately determine human beings’ ability to recognize faces.
Highlights
The ability to recognize strangers from previous interactions is an important application to security, service roles, and various business and social scenarios
Participants exposed to a long image exposure time (LT) were able to remember more faces correctly (M = 3.82) than participants exposed to a short image exposure time (ST), (M = 2.45), F = (1, 130) = 92.86, p < .01, η2 =
Supporting the robustness of our studies, the results of study 3 were similar to the study 1 results on the majority of the investigated aspects: (1) participants exposed to a long image exposure time remembered more faces correctly than participants exposed to a shorter image exposure time; (2) males recognized more faces than females in the ST condition, and (3) no gender difference in face recognition ability was found in the LT condition
Summary
The ability to recognize strangers from previous interactions is an important application to security, service roles, and various business and social scenarios. While prior research suggests that women are better than men at recognizing faces [1, 2], one intriguing research topic is the interplay among gender, face recognition, and exposure time. Say, both Tom and Janet have been exposed to the same number of faces at the same events. The extant literature on face recognition emphasizes that a longer exposure time generally improves individuals’ ability to recognize faces [3, 4]. Several other studies on face recognition demonstrate superior recognition for an individual to recognize their own gender relative to the other [5, 6]
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