Gender differences in Facial recognition of different racial groups.

Introduction:

High level visual cortex may be differentially tuned to recognize faces of own versus different racial group. Differential neural tuning has been implicated in the neural adaptation to the facial recognition for own racial group members due to perceived homogeneity. Neural sensitivity differs according to the extent to which there is physical variation among faces of different racial groups. However, it has also been shown that there are gender biases and females outperform males in their ability for facial recognition. The research article by Huges et al, 2019, addresses the issues of self vs non-self-racial group facial recognition (Hughes et al., 2019). However, this article doesnâ€™t address the gender differences. Therefore a few questions arise. Whether females outperform males in recognizing faces of new (different) racial group? Whether women recognized female faces of the other racial group better than the male faces (LovÃ©n, Herlitz & Rehnman, 2011)?
Hypothesis: There exist gender differences in neural adaptation to facial recognition of different racial group. Women are more adapted to identify and discriminate between the faces of different racial group. The neural adaptation in women may be biased towards the perceived gender of the faces of different racial group.

We will follow the fMRI technique to identify how high-level visual cortex responds in women and men when they identify the faces of the males and females of the other racial group.

Methods:

Our target population will be the adult (18-40yrs of age) illiterate and isolated population of the Central Africa. This age is chosen because at this age the facial recognition ability is best in humans. We use the illiterate and isolated population with a hope that in their life they would have had nil or minimal exposure to the white faces and have not seen movies or videos of the white Caucasian population. We presume that there would be minimal bias due to education and interaction with other racial groups.

Informed consent will be taken from the concerned authorities and all medical ethics will be followed.

Face Localizer task:

Black residents from Central Africa would be grouped into two. Both women as well as men group will be shown white male or white female faces in a localizer task experiment (Stigliani, Weiner & Grill-Spector, 2015; Hughes et al., 2019). The participants will be subjected to a run containing 78 images in 4s blocks of either faces or non-facial body parts, positioned randomly in the visual field. Images will be taken from Bainbridge Face Database ((Bainbridge, Isola & Oliva, 2013)) and Mind, Culture, and Society laboratory database. The images will show at a frequency of 2Hz. The fMRI scanning and anatomical scan will be performed between and within the run. The scanning will be performed for 3 runs of face localizer task (5 min, 24s per run) and 4 runs of fMRI adaptation (4 min per run).

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