Men best at recognising cars and women birds

Vanderbilt psychologists in a test of object-recognition found that men and women see objects differently, with women better at recognising living things and men vehicles.

The study performed an analysis on data from a series of visual recognition tasks collected in the process of developing a new standard test for expertise in object recognition.

"Our motivation was to assess the role that expertise plays in object recognition with a new test that includes many different categories, so we weren't looking for this result," said Professor of Psychology, Isabel Gauthier.

"This isn't the first time that sex differences have been found in perceptual tasks. For example, previous studies have shown that men have an advantage in mental rotation tasks. In fact, a recent study looking only at car recognition found that men were better than women but attributed this to the male advantage in mental rotation," Gauthier added.

"Our finding that women are better than men at recognising objects in other categories suggests that this explanation is incorrect," Gauthier said in a statement.

After familiarising themselves with a number of images, participants were shown three images at a time - one from the study group and two that they haven't seen before - and then are asked to pick out the image that they had studied.

While one goal of the new study was to compare object and face recognition skills, another goal was to develop a better way to measure who has exceptional skills in one domain: how to find the experts in the recognition of cars or birds or even mushrooms.

To do this, the Vanderbilt researchers reasoned that performance on any category of interest needed to be compared to performance on many other categories, to ensure that the self-proclaimed bird expert is not only better with birds than most people, but also better with birds than with most other categories.

They designed the new test with eight categories of visually similar objects: leaves, owls, butterflies, wading birds, mushrooms, cars, planes and motorcycles.

They administered it to 227 subjects - 75 male and 82 female - with a mean age of 23.

The researchers found that increasing the number of categories revealed a large sex difference: Women proved significantly better at recognising living things while men were better at recognising vehicles.

The results were published in the Vision Research journal.