Connectionist and ethological approaches for discovering salient facial movements features in human gender recognition

Individual facial movements signal various social information to other persons, like the gender of the sender. We used an ethological and a connectionist approaches in order to detect these movements and their characteristics in men and in women. Behavioural results indicate both qualitative and quantitative differences between men and women. The connectionist approach involves similar and complementary conclusions. The ethological study has been focused on the main movement differences as well as did the connectionist one but this last approach showed important differences between men and women in motionless events. These pilot results leads to a re-examination of behavioural events and a checking of lateralization of movements correlated with the gender