Never forget a face
Who remembers faces better? Horgan et al. (2004) suspected it would be women, because of their "greater interpersonal orientation", and in the five experiments they ran, women did score better. There seemed to be a tendency for both men and women to more accurately recall a woman's appearance, but this was not statistically significant in all cases.
Shapiro and Penrod's 1986 meta-analysis of facial recognition studies found no difference in gender. Judith A. Hall's 1984 book, Non-Verbal Sex Differences, says that her meta-analysis does find a female advantage in this area. Herlitz and Yonker (2002) reported that women performed better on facial recognition, but in 2006, Rehnman and Herlitz clarified that this only applied to women's faces, and that these effects were magnified by an own-ethnicity bias.
To be honest, I have no idea whether or not I'm good with faces. I certainly don't feel like I am, but I can't tell you if that's another case of my unreasonable personal expectations or not. However, I find it fascinating that women, who tend not to be as visually focused as men, should score as well or better on a visual task like facial recognition. Faces are special. There's even a special word for being unable to recognize faces: prosopagnosia. People dedicate their entire careers to facial recognition, and I can't do it justice in a couple of sentences. We'll be coming back to this topic again.
Shapiro and Penrod's 1986 meta-analysis of facial recognition studies found no difference in gender. Judith A. Hall's 1984 book, Non-Verbal Sex Differences, says that her meta-analysis does find a female advantage in this area. Herlitz and Yonker (2002) reported that women performed better on facial recognition, but in 2006, Rehnman and Herlitz clarified that this only applied to women's faces, and that these effects were magnified by an own-ethnicity bias.
To be honest, I have no idea whether or not I'm good with faces. I certainly don't feel like I am, but I can't tell you if that's another case of my unreasonable personal expectations or not. However, I find it fascinating that women, who tend not to be as visually focused as men, should score as well or better on a visual task like facial recognition. Faces are special. There's even a special word for being unable to recognize faces: prosopagnosia. People dedicate their entire careers to facial recognition, and I can't do it justice in a couple of sentences. We'll be coming back to this topic again.