Humans Can See Race And Sex Even In Simple Out Lines

Live Science ^ | 3-30-2007 | Corey Binns

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Humans Can See Race and Sex Even in Simple Outlines

By Corey Binns
Special to LiveScience
posted: 30 March 2007
12:47 pm ET

Adult minds are so keen at spotting race, gender and age that we can correctly guess those features from nothing more than a black-and-white silhouette, new experiments show.

"It's surprising how much information the silhouette provides," said Stanford University cognitive psychologist Nicolas Davidenko, who led the study. "We rarely have to identify a person in a silhouette, yet in the experiment, people can do that without difficulty."

The way that our brains process faces, he said, seems so flexible that our minds can even assign people to social and biological categories drawing only on views that occur less commonly in our daily lives—including black-and-white profiles.

Davidenko found that people correctly identified the gender of the person in silhouettes 70 percent of the time. Meanwhile, people guessed the correct age—to within 10 years—68 percent of the time. The study details are published in the March 21 issue of the Journal of Vision.

Hair's effect

Men were more easily identified than women and people overestimated the age of the silhouettes by an average of 8 years.

[blam]

I will post the images provided in the next couple posts.

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Can you tell which silhouette goes with the faces in the first two rows? Or which face goes with the other silhouettes? This is how researchers determined that test subjects could identify a person's gender from a simple profile 70 percent of the time and pick our race with 85 percent accuracy. Credit: Nicolas Davidenko and the Journal of Vision, copyright ARVO

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

ping for future.

[blam]

Silhouetted face profiles are made by reducing gray-scale photographs to two-tone black and white images, and then cropping at the forehead, below the chin and down the ear line. Credit: Nicolas Davidenko and the Journal of Vision, copyright ARVO

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Eighteen feature points are localized along the face contour (A), and repositioned on the XY-axis (B). Smooth curves are drawn to connect adjacent points (C) and the region is filled in black to create a mathematically defined silhouette (D). This curve bears a close resemblance to the original (E). Credit: Nicolas Davidenko and the Journal of Vision, copyright ARVO

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

The article isn’t completely clear about the race one. Did the viewers see a silhouette, or just black and white photographs—the former would be much more impressive than the latter.

[martin_fierro]

Hey, just sayin'.

[fieldmarshaldj]

[pabianice]

Duh! My 3-year-old grandkids can do this.

[Eternal_Bear]

I had a very bad cold one time and was talking to a new client. She asked me in a humorous manner, “BTW, Are you a gay black man?” I nearly shouted back “No!” LOL

[beeber]

Hot Dam!

[r-q-tek86]

Adult minds are so keen at spotting race, gender and age that we can correctly guess those features from nothing more than a black-and-white silhouette

I'm guessing 22 year old white girl...

[GoldCountryRedneck]

Not a PC study; the ACLU has banned 'profiling'...

[Centurion2000]

Can I get paid a few hundred grand in grant money to do common sense theory proving?

[Red Badger]

Perhaps it's because we were brainwashed..........

[windcliff]

ping

[ARE SOLE]

Thanks! Some things are just funny as hell. Everytime.

Regards

[Killborn]

What idiots. They are testing geometrical analysis/spatial abilities.

This has nothing, nada, zip to do with race.