The male advantage in child facial resemblance detection: Behavioral and ERP evidence

Abstract

Males have been suggested to have advantages over females in reactions to child facial resemblance, which reflects the evolutionary pressure on males to solve the adaptive paternal uncertainty problem and to identify biological offspring. However, previous studies showed inconsistent results and the male advantage in child facial resemblance perception, as a kin detection mechanism, is still unclear. Here, we investigated the behavioral and brain mechanisms underlying the self-resembling faces processing and how it interacts with sex and age using event-related potential (ERP) technique. The results showed a stable male advantage in self-resembling child faces processing, such that males have higher detectability to self-resembling child faces than females. For ERP results, males showed smaller N2 and larger late positive component (LPC) amplitudes for self-resembling child faces, which may reflect face-matching and self-referential processing in kin detection, respectively. Further source analysis showed that the N2 component and LPC were originated from the anterior cingulate cortex and medial frontal gyrus, respectively. Our results support the male advantage in self-resembling child detection and further indicate that such distinctions can be found in both early and late processing stages in the brain at different regions.

Keywords:

• Kin recognition
• Facial resemblance
• Parental uncertainty
• Paternity cue

This work was supported by the National Basic Research (973) Program [grant numbers 2011CB711000, 2014CB744602]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [grant number 91132704], [grant number 30930031]; the National Key Technologies R&D Program [grant number 2009BAI77B01]; the Global Research Initiative Program, National Institutes of Health, USA [grant number 1R01TW007897] to YJL; the NSFC [grant number 31170971] to CL; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 2012YBXS01] to Haiyan Wu.