The role of visual features in face and body sex perception

Abstract

Category representation is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that supports environmental adaptation. Categories such as faces and bodies were consistently shown to exhibit a pattern of localization of body stimuli in EBA and face stimuli in FFA. The role of those regions in gender representation has generated less consensus across face but not body stimuli, which might be driven by the amount of visual features presented in different experiments. To investigate this, we used rendered and natural-looking pictures of male and female faces and bodies, with ANOVA models to test for interaction effects. EBA results indicated a main effect of experiment (p=0.033) and interactions for experiment x type (rendered/natural, p=0.045), type x hemisphere (p=0.024) and experiment x type x hemisphere (p=0.037). FFA showed a main effect of experiment (p=0.034), experiment x type (p=0.006), sex x type (p=0.045) and type x hemisphere (p=0.007) interactions. The results support the category-specific representation, and the sex x stimulus type (rendered/natural) interaction in FFA but not EBA supports the role of visual features in gender representation and may explain the conflicting results in face but not body-specific areas.