Where are kin recognition signals in the human face?

We report two experiments intended to determine where in the face the cues signalling kinship fall. In both experiments, participants were shown thirty pairs of photographs of children’s faces. Half of the pairs portrayed siblings and half did not. The 220 participants were asked to judge whether each pair of photos portrayed siblings. We measured the effect on kin recognition performance of masks that covered the upper half of the face or the lower half (Experiment 1) and the eye region or the mouth region (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1 we found that the signal detection estimate of performance decreased only 5.3% (n.s.) when the lower face was masked but by more than 65% when the upper face was masked. We tested whether combination of kinship information from the two halves of the face can be treated as optimal combination of independent cues and found that it could be. In Experiment 2, we found that masking the eye region led to only a 20% reduction (n.s.) in performance while masking the mouth region led to a non-significant increase in performance. We also found that the eye region contains only slightly more information about kinship than the upper half of the face outside of the eye region.