Gaetano Justin, van der Zwan Rick, Oxner Matthew, Hayward William G, Doring Natalie, Blair Duncan, Brooks Anna
Cognitive Neuroscience Research Cluster, Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, Australia.
Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China.
PLoS One. 2016 Feb 9;11(2):e0148623. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148623. eCollection 2016.
Visually judging the sex of another can be achieved easily in most social encounters. When the signals that inform such judgements are weak (e.g. outdoors at night), observers tend to expect the presence of males-an expectation that may facilitate survival-critical decisions under uncertainty. The present aim was to examine whether this male bias depends on expertise. To that end, Caucasian and Asian observers targeted female and male hand images that were either the same or different to the observers' race (i.e. long term experience was varied) while concurrently, the proportion of targets changed across presentation blocks (i.e. short term experience change). It was thus found that: (i) observers of own-race stimuli were more likely to report the presence of males and absence of females, however (ii) observers of other-race stimuli--while still tending to accept stimuli as male--were not prone to rejecting female cues. Finally, (iii) male-biased measures did not track the relative frequency of targets or lures, disputing the notion that male bias derives from prior expectation about the number of male exemplars in a set. Findings are discussed in concert with the pan-stimulus model of human sex perception.
在大多数社交场合中，很容易通过视觉判断他人的性别。当用于此类判断的信号较弱时（例如夜间在户外），观察者往往会预期男性的存在——这种预期可能有助于在不确定情况下做出对生存至关重要的决策。目前的目的是研究这种男性偏向是否取决于专业知识。为此，高加索和亚洲观察者将与观察者种族相同或不同的女性和男性手部图像作为目标（即长期经验有所不同），同时，目标的比例在不同的呈现组中发生变化（即短期经验变化）。结果发现：（i）观察本种族刺激的观察者更有可能报告男性的存在和女性的缺失，然而（ii）观察其他种族刺激的观察者——虽然仍然倾向于将刺激视为男性——但不容易拒绝女性线索。最后，（iii）男性偏向的测量结果并未追踪目标或诱饵的相对频率，这对男性偏向源于对一组中男性范例数量的先验预期这一观点提出了质疑。研究结果结合人类性别感知的泛刺激模型进行了讨论。
