Abstract
Maloney and Dal Martello [Maloney, L.T., Dal Martello, M.F. (2006). Kin recognition and the perceived facial similarity of children. Journal of Vision, 6(10), 1047-1056. http://www.journalofvision.org/6/10/4/] reported that similarity ratings of pairs of related and unrelated children were almost perfect predictors of the probability that those children were judged as being siblings by a second group of observers. Surprisingly, similarity ratings were poor predictors of whether a pair was same-sex or opposite-sex, suggesting that people ignore cues that are uninformative about kinship when making similarity judgments of faces. Using adult sibling faces, we find that similarity ratings for same-sex pairs were significantly higher than for opposite-sex pairs, suggesting that similarity judgments of adult faces are not entirely synonymous with kinship judgments.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 38-43 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Vision Research |
Volume | 49 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2009 |
Funding
We thank L. Maloney and M.F. Dal Martello for their very helpful comments and assistance with analysis. The Dept. of Twin Research receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and the NIHR Biomed Research center at Guys and St. Thomas’ and KCL.
Keywords
- face perception
- kin recognition
- resemblance
- similarity