Document Type

Honors

Department

Psychology

Rights Management

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Abstract

The ability to recognize the faces of others has been significant throughout human history. The in-group and out-group bias show that humans remember more faces of people in their own group in most circumstances. This study focused on gender of perceiver and target effects in recognition when faces vary in attractiveness. There were 15 white male and 15 white female participants who engaged in a facial recognition task with a manipulation of target attractiveness. This consisted of the participant encoding 15 male and 15 female computer generated faces for future recognition. The participants saw the same 30 faces randomly mixed with 15 new male and 15 new female faces making a total of 60 faces. They were asked to recognize the faces that they saw in the first set and rate how confident they felt about their answers. The faces used ranged from highly attractive, average, and highly unattractive for both male and female faces. The findings supported the hypothesis that the more attractive or unattractive the faces, the more they will be remembered. Also the findings showed a gender difference in the recognition of faces of the same and other gender.

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