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Women are better a recognizing living things, while men are better at identifying motorized means of transport, according to psychologists at the University of Vanderbilt.

Isabel Gauthier one of the author of the studies notes:

"These results aren't definitive, but they are consistent [the fact that] everyone is born with a general ability to recognize objects and the capability to get really good at it. Nearly everyone becomes expert at recognizing faces, because of their importance for social interactions. Most people also develop expertise for recognizing other types of objects due to their jobs, hobbies or interests. Our culture influences which categories we become interested in, which explains the differences between men and women."

 The results were a surprising find after researchers conducted a series of visual recognition tasks collected in the process of developing a new standard test for expertise in object recognition.

What they found instead was that gender differences in object recognition is a prevalent part of how we see things and why this is the case is even more interesting.

 After familiarizing themselves with a number of images, participants were shown three images at a time - one from the study group and two that they haven't seen before - and then are asked to pick out the image that they had studied.

Researchers wanted to know if facial and object recognition were both skill oriented or could they be innatley idetified.

They administered the specialized visual recognition test to 227 subjects - 75 male and 82 female - with a mean age of 23.

When they analyzed the results collectively, researchers found that women in general were much better at recognizing living things, such as birds, butterflies and plant types while men excelled in identifying cars, planes, and motorcycles.

Researchers will explore these findings further to try and determine why this is the case. So far they offer a tentative theory that it may have a biological connection our hunter gathering days when women were responsible for gathering natural edibles and men fashioning and identifying weapons and other constructs to aid in the hunting process.