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Evolutionary biology

The secrets of faces

Nature volume 394, pages 826–827 (1998)Cite this article

The human face is a bewildering source of information, and our abilities to read and remember faces and facial expressions are extraordinarily well developed1. How faces and our recognition skills have co-evolved, and what information a face can convey, offer many avenues for scientific study.

One thing that faces can tell us is the sex of a person. Although there are only two sexes, we experience many degrees of femininity and masculinity. Perrett and colleagues, reporting on page 884 of this issue2, asked human subjects what these differences mean. They manipulated photographs of human faces by enhancing or diminishing differences between the sexes, then they let the subjects rate these manipulated images. The images were produced by first defining a number of reference points, such as the location of eyebrows, lips, nose and so on. The positions of these points differ in male and female faces, and these differences can be enhanced with computer graphics. For instance, males have bigger jaws than females. So, by increasing the size of the jaws, a more extreme male face is obtained. The authors produced images in which faces varied from feminine to masculine, in this sense, based on the faces of people from Scotland and Japan.

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Figure 1: Face to face — three caricatures showing different features.

References

  1. Bruce, V. & Young, A. In the Eye of the Beholder. The Science of Face Perception (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, University of Stockholm, S-106 91, Stockholm, Sweden

    Magnus Enquist & Stefano Ghirlanda

Authors
  1. Magnus Enquist
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  2. Stefano Ghirlanda
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Enquist, M., Ghirlanda, S. The secrets of faces. Nature 394, 826–827 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/29636

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