The Brain’s Identity Crisis

Faces appear male or female based on their location in the field of view

Harvard and MIT neuroscientists have discovered that the brain sees some faces as male when they appear in one area of a person’s field of view, but female when they appear in a different location. The findings challenge a longstanding tenet of neuroscience: that how the brain sees an object should not depend on where the object is located relative to the observer, says Arash Afraz of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The findings have been described in the online edition of the journal Current Biology.

In the real world, the brain’s inconsistency in assigning gender to faces isn’t noticeable, because there are so many other clues like hair and clothing. But with computer-generated faces, stripped of all other gender-identifying features, a pattern of biases, based on location of the face, emerges.

The researchers showed subjects a random series of faces, ranging from very male to very female. For the more androgynous faces, subjects rated the same faces as male or female depending on where they appeared. The patterns of male and female biases were different for different people. That is, some people judged androgynous faces as female every time they appeared in the upper right corner, while others consistently judged faces in that same location as male.