(Press-News.org) Women are better than men at recognizing living things and men are better than women at recognizing vehicles.
That is the unanticipated result of an analysis Vanderbilt psychologists performed on data from a series of visual recognition tasks collected in the process of developing a new standard test for expertise in object recognition.
"These results aren't definitive, but they are consistent with the following story," said Gauthier. "Everyone is born with a general ability to recognize objects and the capability to get really good at it. Nearly everyone becomes expert at recognizing faces, because of their importance for social interactions. Most people also develop expertise for recognizing other types of objects due to their jobs, hobbies or interests. Our culture influences which categories we become interested in, which explains the differences between men and women."
The results were published online on Aug. 3 in the Vision Research journal in an article titled, "The Vanderbilt Expertise Test Reveals Domain-General and Domain-Specific Sex Effects in Object Recognition."
"Our motivation was to assess the role that expertise plays in object recognition with a new test that includes many different categories, so we weren't looking for this result," said Professor of Psychology Isabel Gauthier. She directs the lab where post-doctoral fellow Rankin McGugin conducted the study.
"This isn't the first time that sex differences have been found in perceptual tasks. For example, previous studies have shown that men have an advantage in mental rotation tasks. In fact, a recent study looking only at car recognition found that men were better than women but attributed this to the male advantage in mental rotation. Our finding that women are better than men at recognizing objects in other categories suggests that this explanation is incorrect."
Discovery of the sex effect in object recognition also casts doubt on several studies that claim an individual's ability to recognize faces is largely independent of his or her ability to recognize objects.
"Face recognition abilities are exciting to study because they have been found to have a clear genetic basis," said Gauthier, "and many studies conclude that abilities in face recognition are not predicted by abilities in object recognition. But this is usually based on comparing faces to only one object category for men and women."
It took the multi-category analysis to reveal that face recognition abilities are correlated to the ability to recognize different object categories for men and women. For example, men who are better at recognizing vehicles also tend to be better at recognizing faces, while women who are better at recognizing living things tend to be better at recognizing faces.
The researchers modeled their new test after the well-established Cambridge Face Memory Task, which effectively measures a person's ability to recognize faces. After familiarizing themselves with a number of images, participants are shown three images at a time – one from the study group and two that they haven't seen before – and then are asked to pick out the image that they had studied.
While one goal of the new study was to compare object and face recognition skills, another goal was to develop a better way to measure who has exceptional skills in one domain: how to find the experts in the recognition of cars or birds or even mushrooms. To do this, the Vanderbilt researchers reasoned that performance on any category of interest needed to be compared to performance on many other categories, to ensure that the self-proclaimed bird expert is not only better with birds than most people, but also better with birds than with most other categories. So they designed the new test with eight categories of visually similar objects: leaves, owls, butterflies, wading birds, mushrooms, cars, planes and motorcycles.
To evaluate the new test, they administered it to 227 subjects – 75 male and 82 female – with a mean age of 23. When the results of the entire group were analyzed, the researchers found that increasing the number of categories revealed a large sex difference: Women proved significantly better at recognizing living things while men were better at recognizing vehicles. In addition, the researchers administered a face recognition test to about half of the participants, which allowed them to determine the correlation between vehicle recognition and face recognition in men and the correlation between recognition of living things and faces in women.
INFORMATION:
Vanderbilt post-doctoral fellow Jennifer Richler as well as Grit Herzmann, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Research Assistant Magen Speegle also contributed to the study.
The research was supported by the National Eye Institute grants EYO13441-06A2 and P30-EY008126 and by the National Science Foundation's Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center grant SBE-0542013.
Visit Research News @ Vanderbilt for more research news from Vanderbilt. [Media Note: Vanderbilt has a 24/7 TV and radio studio with a dedicated fiber optic line and ISDN line. Use of the TV studio with Vanderbilt experts is free, except for reserving fiber time.]
Sex matters: Guys recognize cars and women recognize birds best
2012-09-18
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Study: Parole decisions affect rehabilitation incentives
2012-09-18
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Long mandatory minimum sentences or strong limits on judicial discretion can counter-productively reduce the incentives of prison inmates to engage in rehabilitative behavior, thereby raising recidivism rates, according to published research co-written by a University of Illinois economics professor.
Dan Bernhardt, the IBE Distinguished Professor of Economics at Illinois, says rehabilitation incentives are maximized when the lengths of prison sentences are neither too short, nor too long.
According to the paper, inmates with short prison sentences ...
International team of physicists makes discovery about temperature in convection
2012-09-18
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– An international team of physicists is working to ascertain more about the fundamental physical laws that are at work in a process known as convection, which occurs in a boiling pot of water as well as in the turbulent movement of the liquid outer core of the Earth. The team's new finding specifies the way that the temperature of a gas or liquid varies with the distance from a heat source during convection. The research is expected to eventually help engineers with applications such as the design of cooling systems, for instance, in nuclear power ...
UCI researchers find cause of chemotherapy resistance in melanoma
2012-09-18
Irvine, Calif., Sept. 17, 2012 — Researchers with UC Irvine's Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a major reason why melanoma is largely resistant to chemotherapy.
UCI dermatologist Dr. Anand Ganesan and colleagues found a genetic pathway in melanoma cells that inhibits the cellular mechanism for detecting DNA damage wrought by chemotherapy, thereby building up tolerance to cancer-killing drugs.
Targeting this pathway, comprising the genes RhoJ and Pak1, heralds a new approach to treating the deadly skin cancer, which claims nearly 10,000 U.S. lives ...
Summer Geoscience from GSA Bulletin
2012-09-18
Boulder, Colo., USA – GSA Bulletin papers posted online from 20 July through 14 September 2012 elaborate on geoscience from Algeria, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, Nova Scotia, Switzerland, New Mexico, and the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Topics include tectonics, mineral formation, the Moho, age dating using zircon crystals, the Code of Stratigraphic Nomenclature, atmospheric CO2, and early animal evolution.
GSA Bulletin articles published ahead of print are online at http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/early/recent. Representatives of the media may obtain complimentary copies of ...
Mayo Clinic researchers identify new enzyme to fight Alzheimer's disease
2012-09-18
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — An enzyme that could represent a powerful new tool for combating Alzheimer's disease has been discovered by researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida. The enzyme — known as BACE2 — destroys beta-amyloid, a toxic protein fragment that litters the brains of patients who have the disease. The findings were published online Sept. 17 in the science journal Molecular Neurodegeneration.
Alzheimer's disease is the most common memory disorder. It affects more that 5.5 million people in the United States. Despite the disorder's enormous financial and personal ...
Cystic fibrosis disrupts pancreas two ways in CF-related diabetes
2012-09-18
A new University of Iowa study suggests there are two root causes of a type of diabetes associated with cystic fibrosis (CF). The findings, which already have sparked a clinical trial, may guide development of new treatments or even help prevent diabetes in patients with CF.
Almost half of patients with CF will develop diabetes by age 30 and almost one quarter will develop it in their teens. In addition to the health problems caused by high blood sugar, diabetes also worsens lung disease and increases the risk of dying for people with CF. However, the underlying cause ...
Antibiotic-resistant pathogens persist in antibiotic-free pigs
2012-09-18
Researchers from North Carolina State University have found identical strains of antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter coli (C. coli) in both antibiotic-free (ABF) and conventionally raised pigs. This finding may indicate that these antibiotic-resistant pathogens can persist and thrive in the environment, regardless of antimicrobial usage by pork producers.
Dr. Siddhartha Thakur, assistant professor of population health and pathobiology, had previously found that antibiotic-resistant C. coli, a leading cause of foodborne illness in the U.S., was present in both ABF-certified ...
Why home cities matter, refueling willpower, decision speed and moral character, and more
2012-09-18
New in our journals:
Your city matters: San Francisco v. Boston
Your home city matters for both who you are and how you feel, according to a new suite of studies. In seven studies, researchers examined the history and culture of San Francisco and Boston, as well as surveyed residents (including commuters, college students, and middle-aged residents) of each city. They found that San Francisco showed more emphasis on egalitarianism, innovation, and looser social norms, while Boston emphasizes tradition, community, and tighter social norms. As a result, for Bostonians, ...
Cleveland Clinic study shows vitamin E may decrease cancer risk in Cowden syndrome patients
2012-09-18
Saturday, September 15, 2012, Cleveland: Cleveland Clinic researchers have discovered that vitamin E may prevent cancer in patients with an under-recognized genetic disorder.
Several genetic mutations are known to be present in Cowden Syndrome (CS) – a disease that predisposes individuals to several types of cancers, including breast and thyroid cancers. One type of mutation in the succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) genes may be responsible for cancer development, according to research by Charis Eng, M.D., Ph.D., Hardis Chair and Director of the Genomic Medicine Institute ...
Risk of developing diabetes higher in neighborhoods that aren't walk-friendly: Study
2012-09-18
TORONTO, Sept. 17, 2012—Whether your neighbourhood is conducive to walking could determine your risk for developing diabetes, according to a new study by researchers at St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.
Researchers found this risk was particularly high for new immigrants living in low-income neighbourhoods. A new immigrant living in a less walkable neighbourhood – fewer destinations within a 10-minute walk, lower residential density, poorly connected streets – was about 50 per cent more likely to develop diabetes when compared ...