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Abstract

We investigated whether the judgment of face gender shows the typical characteristics of categorical perception. As stimuli we used images of morphs created between pairs of male/female 3-D head laser scans. In experiment 1, texture and shape were morphed between both faces. In experiment 2, either the average texture of all faces was mapped onto the shape continuum between the two faces or we mapped the texture continuum between each face pair onto an average shape face. Thus, either the shape or the texture remained constant in any one condition. The subjects viewed these morphs first in a discrimination task (XAB) and then in a categorisation task which was used to locate the subjective gender boundary between each male/female face pair. Although we found that subjects could categorise the face images by their gender in the categorisation task and that texture alone is a better gender indicator than shape alone, the subjects did not discriminate more easily between face images situated at the category boundary in any of our discrimination experiments. We argue that we do not perceive the gender of a face categorically and that more cues are needed to decide the gender of a person than those provided by the faces only.