Whether a face looks like that of a man or a woman depends on the part of the retina on which the image lands.
Eleven volunteers were asked to identify the gender of a series of faces (pictured) presented in one of eight possible visual-field locations relative to a central point. Arash Afraz at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his co-workers found that two identical faces were perceived to be of different gender if they were presented simultaneously in specific, different locations. Volunteers' responses became more consistent across the visual field as the images grew in size.
The researchers think that the perceptual variation may result from the small size of the stimuli relative to that of the receptive field. The small number of brain cells analysing the images at any given location may have varying responses; these are averaged out by a larger image, which stimulates a greater number of cells.
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Vision science: Man or woman? Depends on view. Nature 468, 1005 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/4681005c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4681005c
