Women remember more faces than men do.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Human Behavior

Background:

• Previous research indicates women outperform men in recognizing female faces, a phenomenon known as own-sex bias.
• Men typically do not display a similar own-sex bias in face recognition tasks.
• The generality of these sex differences across various face types and ethnicities requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether women's superior face recognition extends to male faces and different age groups and ethnicities.
• To examine the presence and extent of own-sex bias in face recognition for both men and women.
• To explore potential reasons, such as differential interest in faces, underlying observed sex differences in facial memory.

Main Methods:

• Participants included 107 men and 112 women.
• Participants viewed faces of children and adults from Swedish and Bangladeshi origins.
• A later recognition memory test assessed performance across different face categories.

Main Results:

• Women demonstrated superior recognition performance compared to men across all tested face categories (female, male, child, adult, Swedish, Bangladeshi).
• Women showed particular strength in recognizing female faces, confirming previous findings.
• Men did not exhibit an own-sex bias; their performance on male faces was not significantly better than on female faces.

Conclusions:

• Women exhibit a general advantage in face recognition over men, irrespective of the target's sex, age, or ethnicity.
• The findings suggest that women's enhanced interest in faces, particularly female faces, may contribute to their superior facial memory.
• The absence of an own-sex bias in men indicates that face recognition differences between sexes are not solely driven by in-group preference.