近日，發表在Laterality上的一篇文章顯示，男性可以迅速的用大腦左部分辨出人臉圖像。

　　薩利大學研究小組調研了42個誌願者，他們被要求盯住電腦屏幕的中心處，然後屏幕上閃現了280張不同的男女麵孔，之後讓誌願者快速分辨出這些麵孔是男是女。研究發現當畫麵呈現在左半腦時大部分人是男性誌願者，盡管這與用右半腦的女性誌願者辨識麵孔的正確率是一樣的。

　　薩利大學之前的研究發現英語母語講述者男性超過女性，其中一部分原因是由於刻板印象造成的。在描述浪漫的情侶名字時，無論他們是描述一個異性情侶還是同性伴侶時，人們通常將名字更為男性化的人名放在首位，——例如，“羅密歐與朱麗葉”和“亞當和夏娃”。這項新的研究調查用的是英語和英語誌願者，以英語為母語的男性感知麵孔會導致一種偏倚，從而會影響我們感知他人麵孔的思路，因為左大腦是處理語言的區域。

　　“我們的研究非常清楚地表明當男性麵孔在左半腦顯示時，人們會做出快速的決定。”薩利大學Sapphira Thorne說。

　　“重要的是我們要認識到瞬間判斷一個人的性別並不總是正確的，我們應該了解我們無意間判斷和歸類麵孔的能力。社會日益承認變性人定義自己性別身份的權利，而依靠我們的刻板印象來判斷他人的性別可能會導致歧視現象的發生。”

　　推薦的新聞閱讀：

　　As the researchers note, the importance of paying attention at important times has become more important in our modern society—lapses can lead to car accidents or looking silly in a business meeting. They, like many others, wanted to know if a way could be found to cause people to be better at paying attention. To find out they enlisted the assistance of several volunteers who agreed to lay down inside of an fMRI machine while they played what amounted to a simple video game.
       The idea was relatively straight forward, ask the volunteers to look at images of landscapes with people's faces superimposed over them and to press a button when the face shown was female (which was most of the time) and then to press a button depending on whether the landscape scene was inside or outside. Very easy and very boring, which was the point, they wanted the volunteers to zone out. As the volunteers did as they were asked, their brains were scanned by the fMRI with the images sent to a computer running pattern recognition software that was able to detect if they were looking at a male or female face or an indoor or outdoor scene, which meant is could tell when the person was spacing out.
        The next part involved training the mind—when the software detected mind wandering, it automatically made very subtle changes to what the volunteers were seeing, making the background landscape grow dimmer for example, to highlight the face on top of it. By doing so, the researchers were able to cause an improvement in focus (as compared to a control group which did not get any brain feedback adjustments to their screen) by the volunteers as evidenced by the scores they received while playing their video game. That showed, the researchers claimed, that they were able to exercise the brain in a way that caused an improved ability to pay attention.
The findings by the team may or may not relate to real world situations, but the team is confident that they have found that providing feedback from a person's own brain can help improve concentration abilities.