Facial Recognition Study

One of my friends is doing a child development class at school. She needed to show pictures to a variety of children of different ages to study when gender awareness came into play. The pictures were just faces at first--hair, clothing etc, was covered by a paper border. The kids each said whether they thought the face was male or female. Then when she went through the pics, she would lift up the border and they would see the face more traditionally and either confirm or change their decision.

L. was nice and let Chet do this as well, even though at 26 he is statistically not in the groups that she needs to explore. But he was fascinated by the project and clearly wanted to be asked and she picked up on it.  Predictably he had a  hard tiime with it.  He still has a hard time with recognizing people he does not know well and it is an aspect of his autism.  I find that he tends to glom onto a specific feature or style of clothing to describe someone from church to me.

Rob was more in the societal norms as I would have expected also.  However what was surprising was that Lissa scored higher than KC.  She got almost every single one correct.  KC who at first thought should have rocked the test, scored at the same level as my friends 4 year old.  Poor L is going to have some wonky results to tabulate. 

However as I think it over, KC is my fey child.  My guy who does arabesques and jetes down the empty aisle of a grocery store.  And who wears sparkly bits of cloth when we play dress up.  I'm not sure gender, even though he clearly knows he is a boy and self identifies as such, is as important to him for some reason. Intriguing though.