Electrophysiological evidence for women superiority on unfamiliar face processing

Previous research has reported that women superiority on face recognition tasks, taking sex difference in accuracy rates as major evidence. By appropriately modifying experimental tasks and examining reaction time as behavioral measure, it was possible to explore which stage of face processing contributes to womens’ superiority. We used a modified delayed matching-to-sample task to investigate the time course characteristics of face recognition by ERP, for both men and women. In each trial, participants matched successively presented faces to samples (target faces) by key pressing. It was revealed that women were more accurate and faster than men on the task. ERP results showed that compared to men, women had shorter peak latencies of early components P100 and N170, as well as larger mean amplitude of the late positive component P300. Correlations between P300 mean amplitudes and RTs were found for both sexes. Besides, reaction times of women but not men were positively correlated with N170 latencies. In general, we provided further evidence for women superiority on face recognition in both behavioral and neural aspects.