It’s a girl! Opponent versus multichannel neural coding of face gender N Kloth1, S Pond2, L Jeffery2, E McKone3, J Irons3, G Rhodes2 |
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1School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia, Australia |
| Although we can easily categorise the gender of a face, the underlying neural mechanisms are not well understood. Recently, Zhao et al. (2011) measured the size of aftereffects induced by adaptors with increasing levels of gender-caricaturing, to determine whether gender is opponent or multichannel coded. The opponent coding model predicts aftereffects to increase as adaptor extremity increases. The multichannel coding model also predicts increased aftereffects for small increases in adaptor extremity. But, as adaptors become very extreme aftereffects should decrease. Zhao et al. (2011) found reduced gender aftereffects for the most extreme adaptor levels, which they interpreted as evidence for multichannel-coding of gender. However, this interpretation assumes that the perceived gender of faces increases with increasing exaggeration of differences between male and female faces. Here we show that this is not the case over the very large range of gender-caricaturing that they used. We also show that gender aftereffects increase monotonically with increasing levels of gender-dimorphism over twice the normal range. Moreover, we found an almost perfect correlation between the perceived level of gender dimorphism of the adaptor and the magnitude of gender aftereffects. These findings support opponent coding of facial gender. |
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