Biological sex determines whether faces look real

Judging whether a face is real or artificial can be done relatively rapidly and accurately, even when visual information is substantially impoverished. The perception of animacy in the face also has several interesting properties that may reflect both the underlying tuning of face space to preferentially represent real face appearance and the diagnosticity of individual features for categorizing faces as animate or inanimate. In the current study, we examined how sex categories interact with animacy perception by separately characterizing animacy judgements as a function of stimulus sex. We find that stimulus sex affects subjective ratings of animacy and sex categorization of real and artificial faces. Specifically, female faces look more artificial and artificial faces look more female. We discuss our results in terms of the ecology of real and artificial faces and the possible role of visual experience with artificial female faces, and the objectification of female faces.