Uncovering gender discrimination cues in a realistic setting Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada Nicolas Dupuis-Roy Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada Isabelle Fortin Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada Daniel Fiset Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada Frédéric Gosselin Which face cues do we use for gender discrimination? Few studies have tried to answer this question and the few that have tried typically used only a small set of grayscale stimuli, often distorted and presented a large number of times. Here, we reassessed the importance of facial cues for gender discrimination in a more realistic setting. We applied BubblesVa technique that minimizes bias toward specific facial features and does not necessitate the distortion of stimuliVto a set of 300 color photographs of Caucasian faces, each presented only once to 30 participants. Results show that the region of the eyes and the eyebrowsVprobably in the light-dark channelVis the most important facial cue for accurate gender discrimination; and that the mouth region is driving fast correct responses (but not fast incorrect responses)Vthe gender discrimination information in the mouth region is concentrated in the red-green color channel. Together, these results suggest that, when color is informative in the mouth region, humans use it and respond rapidly; and, when it’s not informative, they have to rely on the more robust but more sluggish luminance information in the eye-eyebrow region. Keywords: gender discrimination, color vision, bubbles, classification image, face perception Citation: Dupuis-Roy, N., Fortin, I., Fiset, D., & Gosselin, F. (2009). Uncovering gender discrimination cues in a realistic setting. Journal of Vision, 9(2):10, 1–8, http://journalofvision.org/9/2/10/, doi:10.1167/9.2.10. Introduction Which face cues are we using for gender discrimina- tion? Up until now, the small body of studies on this topic has highlighted the importance of the eyes, the eyebrows, the jaw and the face outline (e.g., Brown & Perrett, 1993; Nestor & Tarr, 2008a, 2008b; Russell, 2003, 2005; Yamaguchi, Hirukawa, & Kanazawa, 1995). Using Bubbles, Schyns, Bonnar, and Gosselin (2002; see also Gosselin & Schyns, 2001) found that relatively coarse eye and mouth information (5.62–22.5 cycles per face width for a face width subtending about 4 cycles per degree of visual angle) were significantly correlated with gender discrimination in humans. Relatedly, the distance between the brows and the upper eyelid was identified as the most reliable relational cue to gender in facial images (Burton, Bruce, & Dench, 1993; Campbell, Benson, Wallace, Doesbergh, & Coleman, 1999). Experiments investigating the role of pigmentation cues showed that human observers could rely on chromatic informationV mostly on the red-green axisVto categorize gender especially when minimal discriminative shape information were revealed (Bruce & Langton, 1994; Hill, Bruce, & Akamatsu, 1995; Tarr, Kersten, Cheng, & Rossion, 2001; Tarr, Rossion, & Doerschner, 2002). The regions sur- rounding the eyes and the mouth were also found to be the most determinant chromatically (Nestor & Tarr, 2008b). All the studies cited above suffer from at least one of the following three potentially serious limitations on external validity. First, all of themVexcept Gosselin and Schyns (2001), Nestor and Tarr (2008a), and Schyns et al. (2002)Vmanipulated specific features and regions of the face with techniques such as morphing and caricaturing. These manipulations could have distorted the natural characteristics of authentic faces. Moreover, selective manipulation of these features might have biased the results toward a limited sample of all the facial informa- tion available. Second, the face stimuli used in all of these studiesVexcept the studies performed by Tarr and colleaguesVwere grayscale pictures or they were con- trolled for different aspects (e.g., hair and ears removed, no makeup). In fact, the skin and hair reflectance proper- ties of males and females differ (makeup only exaggerates these spectral dimorphismVRussell, 2003) and, as we have mentioned above, human observers can use these Journal of Vision (2009) 9(2):10, 1–8 http://journalofvision.org/9/2/10/ 1 doi: 10.1167/9.2.10 Received September 28, 2008; published February 10, 2009 ISSN 1534-7362 * ARVO