 | | | | Related Healthscout Videos | |
|
(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Men tend to have more reddish skin while women tend to have more greenish skin, researchers discovered in an analysis of dozens of faces.
Researchers say this finding can impact cognitive science research such as face perception. It may also influence industry and consumer areas, including facial recognition technology, advertising and studies on how and why women apply makeup.
Text Continues Below
"Color information is very robust and useful for telling a man from a woman," Michael J. Tarr, a scientist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., was quoted as saying. "It's a demonstration that color can be useful in visual object recognition."
To find the color difference, Tarr and his colleague Adrian Nestor analyzed about 200 images of white male and female faces, photographed using a 3-D scanner under the same lighting conditions and with no makeup.
After discovering the color distinction of genders, the concept was tested on subjects asked to observe androgynous images clouded by static color, tinted either slightly more red or green. The subjects were asked to identify the gender of each image. They tended to identify male images are redder and female subjects as greener.
SOURCE: Psychological Science, published online December 8, 2008
Sign up for a free weekly e-mail on Medical Breakthroughs called First to Know by clicking here.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
|
.gif)
