The role of facial skin tone and texture in the perception of age.

Age and gender perception from looking at people's faces, without any cultural or conventional cues, is primarily based on two independent components: a) the shape or facial structure, and b) surface reflectance (skin tone and texture, STT). This study examined the relative contribution of facial STT to the perception of age. A total of 204 subjects participated in four experiments presenting artificial 3D realistic faces of different age versions under two key experimental conditions: with and without STT. Two experiments involved a discrimination-age task, and other two involved a direct age-estimation task. The faces for the last experiment were generated from the photographs of real people. The results were quite consistent throughout the experiments. Data suggest that the contribution of the STT information leads to roughly 25-33 % of accuracy in age perception. Interestingly, a differential pattern emerges in relation to facial age: the relative contribution of skin information increases sharply with advancing age, to the point that age judgments of the older faces (60 years old) without STT information fall to the chance level. This pattern suggests that facial skin tone and texture are the main sources of information for estimating the age of people past their maturity as those are the principal visual signs of aging beyond the anatomical changes of facial structure.

Body Perception From Connected Speech: Speaker Height Discrimination from Natural Sentences and Sine-Wave Replicas with and without Pitch.

In addition to language, the human voice carries information about the physical characteristics of speakers, including their body size (height and weight). The fundamental speaking frequency, perceived as voice pitch, and the formant frequencies, or resonators of the vocal tract, are the acoustic speech parameters that have been most intensely studied for perceiving a speaker's body size. In this study, we created sine-wave (SW) replicas of connected speech (sentences) uttered by 20 male and 20 female speakers, consisting of three time-varying sinusoidal waves matching the frequency pattern of the first three formants of each sentence. These stimuli only provide information about the formant frequencies of a speech signal. We also created a new experimental condition by adding a sinusoidal replica of the voice pitch of each sentence. Results obtained from a binary discrimination task revealed that (a) our SW replicas provided sufficient useful information to accurately judge the speakers' body height at an above chance level; (b) adding the sinusoidal replica about the voice pitch did not significantly increase accuracy; and (c) stimuli from female speakers were more informative for body height detection and allowed higher perceptual accuracy, due to a stronger correlation between formant frequencies and actual body height than stimuli from male speakers.

Sex perception from facial structure: Categorization with and without skin texture and color.

Sex identification of faces without any cultural or conventional sex cue is primarily based on two independent components: a) shape or facial structure, and b) surface reflectance (skin texture and color). The present work studied the relative contribution of each component by means of two experiments based on 3D face models created with different degrees of masculinity-femininity within a sex continuum. The first experiment utilized totally artificial faces created ex novo by computer. The second employed face models created from photographs of real people. The results of both experiments were consistent. As expected, when both components were present in a face, sex was correctly classified in almost all the cases. More interestingly, the contribution of the "pure" facial structure to the sex perception (with no surface reflectance) was about 80%, whereas 20% of the total information was provided by the surface reflectance. Furthermore, examination of the psychometric curves suggests that the information provided by surface reflectance contributes to a categorical perception of facial sex, since when it is removed the sex is perceived in a more continuous / less categorical way. On the other hand, our stimuli presented a certain "male" bias, repeatedly found in the literature on facial sex perception.

Perceiving Body Height From Connected Speech: Higher Fundamental Frequency Is Associated With the Speaker's Height.

To a certain degree, human listeners can perceive a speaker's body size from their voice. The speaker's voice pitch or fundamental frequency (Fo) and the vocal formant frequencies are the voice parameters that have been most intensively studied in past body size perception research (particularly for body height). Artificially lowering the Fo of isolated vowels from male speakers improved listeners' accuracy of binary (i.e., tall vs not tall) body height perceptions. This has been explained by the theory that a denser harmonic spectrum provided by a low pitch improved the perceptual resolution of formants that aid formant-based size assessments. In the present study, we extended this research using connected speech (i.e., words and sentences) pronounced by speakers of both sexes. Unexpectedly, we found that raising Fo, not lowering it, increased the participants' perceptual performance in two binary discrimination tasks of body size. We explain our new finding in the temporal domain by the dynamic and time-varying acoustic properties of connected speech. Increased Fo might increase the sampling density of sound wave acoustic cycles and provide more detailed information, such as higher resolution, on the envelope shape.

Facial structure and perception of sexual orientation: Research with face models based on photographs of real people.

Some evidence suggests that lay persons are able to perceive sexual orientation from face stimuli above the chance level. A morphometric study of 390 heterosexual and homosexual Canadian people of both sexes reported that facial structure differed depending on the sexual orientation. Gay and heterosexual men differed on three metrics as the most robust multivariate predictors, and lesbian and heterosexual women differed on four metrics. A later study verified the perceptual validity of these multivariate predictors using artificial three-dimensional face models created by manipulating the key parameters. Nevertheless, there is evidence of important processing differences between the perception of real faces and the perception of artificial computer-generated faces. The present study which composed of two experiments tested the robustness of the previous findings and extended the research by experimentally manipulating the facial features in face models created from photographs of real people. Participants of the Experiment 1 achieved an overall accuracy (0.67) significantly above the chance level (0.50) in a binary hetero/homosexual judgement task, with some important differences between male and female judgements. On the other hand, results of the Experiment 2 showed that participants rated the apparent sexual orientation of series of face models created from natural photographs as a continuous linear function of the multivariate predictors. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Women in contemporary cancer research.

Despite recent advances, gender inequality persists in many scientific fields including medicine. Thus far, no study has extensively analyzed the gender composition of contemporary researchers in the oncology field. We examined 40 oncological journals (Web of Science, Oncology category) with different impact factors (Q1-Q4) and extracted all the articles and reviews published during 2015-2017 in order to identify the gender of their authors. Our data showed that women represent about 38% of all the authorships, both in articles and reviews. In relative terms, women are overrepresented as first authors of articles (43.8%), and clearly underrepresented as last or senior authors (<30%). This double pattern, also observed in other medical fields, suggests that age, or more specifically, seniority, may play some role in the gender composition of cancer researchers. Examining the pattern of collaboration, an interesting finding was observed: the articles signed by a woman in the first or in the last position roughly showed gender parity in the byline. We also found some differences in the content of the articles depending on which gender occupies the first and last positions of the authorships.

Women Publishing in American Psychological Association Journals: A Gender Analysis of Six Decades.

Despite recent advances, gender inequality persists in many scientific fields, and Psychology is not alien to this phenomenon. This study presents the evolution of gender composition in American Psychological Association publications in the past six decades, from 1963 to 2016. Longitudinal analysis revealed an important change: women rose from a tiny 12% to 14% in the 1960s to almost gender parity in the last decade (2010s). The pattern of collaboration (coauthorship) shows that women tend to be slightly overrepresented as first author and underrepresented as the last or senior author. In the last two decades, women outnumber men as "new" American Psychological Association authors (authors who publish for the first time in an American Psychological Association journal). These features and the fact that men's publications tend to encompass a much wider range of years suggest that age may play a role in the gender composition of American Psychological Association contributors.