Discriminating another's biological sex is considered a fundamental aspect of human behaviour and as such, understanding how it is achieved is important. Traditionally, research efforts have focused on how male and female signals are extracted from particular body-based stimulus sets. Taking a broader approach, I intend to investigate to what extent those documented correlates of sex perception are common across disparate body representations.

Employing a novel stimulus set comprised of human hand images, I have found robust evidence suggesting that one such correlate – male bias – is pan-stimulus in nature. On that basis, the possibility that sex discrimination is subserved by specialised common neural mechanisms is discussed.

Justin Gaetano, BPsych(Hons, 1st), is a PhD candidate and university medallist under the supervision of Dr. Anna Brooks and A/Prof. Rick van der Zwan. Broadly speaking, Justin's area of research interest is "other person perception": the study of how the human nervous system processes multisensory and multicategorical data to produce coherent representations of other human agents.

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