Face adaptation to gender: Does adaptation transfer across age categories?

Abstract

We examined gender adaptation effects for the faces of children and adults and measured the transfer of these effects across age categories. Face gender adaptation is defined by a bias to classify the gender of a gender-neutral face to be opposite to that of an adapting face. An androgynous face, for example, appears male following adaptation to a female face. Participants adapted to male or female faces from the two age categories and classified the gender of morphed adult and child faces from a male–female morph trajectory. Gender adaptation effects were found for children's and adults’ faces and for the transfer between the age categories. The size of these effects was comparable when participants adapted to adult faces and identified the gender of either adult or child faces, and when participants adapted to child faces and identified the gender of child faces. A smaller adaptation effect was found when participants adapted to a child's face but identified the gender of an adult's face. The results indicate an interconnected and partially shared representation of the gender information for child and adult faces. The lack of symmetry in adaptation transfer between child and adult faces suggests that adaptation to adult faces is more effective than adaptation to child faces in activating a gender representation that generalizes across age categories.

Keywords:

• Adaptation
• Face recognition
• Facial age
• Gender categories
• Perceptual learning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Laura Chomiak, Alison Gray, David Highhill, Fang Jiang, Leigh Richards, and Katherine Thorne for their assistance with this project.

Notes

¹We have chosen to use the term “gender” throughout our paper as our work focuses on the perception and conception of individuals as male or female. This usage is consistent with existing patterns of usage in both the perception and developmental literature (e.g., “gender adaptation”, “gender constancy”) and follows Butler's (1990) call “to think of gender as a pre-existing system of classification into which biological differences are assimilated and interpreted” (Crawford & Fox, 2007, p. 483). Although we generally opted to use the more inclusive term “gender”, we do use the term “sex” when referring to characteristics of the stimuli (“same sex faces”) and honour original terminology (“sex-contingent aftereffects”).

²Individual child faces were used as stimuli in Wild et al.'s (2000) experiments. The morphed prototypes were created to illustrate that boys’ and girls’ faces are distinguishable.