Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue

摘要

BackgroundAlmost every interpersonal interaction is mediated by the sex of the individuals involved. Visual, auditory, and olfactory cues provide individuals with the opportunity to discriminate the sex of others from a distance and so prepare sex-appropriate behaviours for any impending interaction. The usefulness of that important social skill is mediated by the reliability of the sensory information. Sometimes cues in one domain will be ambiguous, and the perceptual processes mediating sex perceptions will need to integrate information from across the senses for better reliability. With that in mind, the experiment reported here was designed to explore the effect of olfactory-visual interactions on sex perceptions.