Exploring the Contribution of Motivation and Experience in the Postpubescent Own-Gender Bias in Face Recognition

The own-gender bias in face recognition has been hypothesized to be the result of extensive experience with own-gender faces, coupled with a motivation to process own-group faces more deeply than other-group faces. We test the effect of experience and motivation in four experiments employing standard old/new recognition paradigms. In Experiment 1, no own-gender recognition bias was observed following an attractiveness-rating encoding task regardless of school type (single- or mixed-sex). Experiment 2, which used a distinctiveness-rating encoding task, did find a significant own-gender bias for all groups of participants. Experiment 3 on adults found that the own-gender bias was not affected by self-reported contact with the other-gender, but the encoding task did moderate the size of the bias. Experiment 4 revealed that participants with an own-gender sexual orientation showed a stronger own-gender bias. These results indicate that motivational factors influence the own-gender bias whereas no evidence was found for perceptual experience. Public Significance Statement This study suggests that the biases that exist in face perception (the bias toward recognizing faces of one's own gender) may be due to how interested we are in processing those types of faces. To reduce biases toward recognizing faces of one's own group, we must have sufficient motivation to process other-group faces deeply.