Fitting the mind to the World

Abstract

Average faces are attractive, but what is average depends on experience. We examined the effect of brief exposure to consistent facial distortions on what looks normal (average) and what looks attractive. Adaptation to a consistent distortion shifted what looked most normal, and what looked most attractive, toward that distortion. These normality and attractiveness aftereffects occurred when the adapting and test faces differed in orientation by 90 degrees (+45 degrees vs. -45 degrees ), suggesting adaptation of high-level neurons whose coding is not strictly retino- topic. Our results suggest that perceptual adaptation can rapidly recalibrate people's preferences to fit the faces they see. The results also suggest that average faces are attractive because of their central location in a distribution of faces (i.e., prototypicality), rather than because of any intrinsic appeal of particular physical characteristics. Recalibration of preferences may have important consequences, given the powerful effects of perceived attractiveness on person perception, mate choice, social interactions, and social outcomes for individuals.

Face-Space: A Unifying Concept in Face Recognition Research

“…This is the typical face distortion after-effect (FDAE). Contrastive facial after-effects have also been observed for judgments of attractiveness (Rhodes, Jeffery, Watson, Clifford, & Nakayama, 2003), personality (Buckingham et al, 2006;Wincenciak, Dzhelyova, Perrett, & Barraclough, 2013), emotion and gender (Webster, Kaping, Mizokami, & Duhamel, 2004) and identity (Leopold, O'Toole, Vetter, & Blanz, 2001;Leopold, Rhodes, Müller, & Jeffery, 2005). Face after-effects transfer across face identities (even to the perceivers' own face; Webster & MacLin, 1999), from an adaptor of one size to test stimuli of a different size (Zhao & Chubb, 2001), across different parts of the retina (Hurlbert, 2001;Anderson & Wilson, 2005) and partially across viewpoints (Jeffery, Rhodes, & Bussey, 2006;Pourtois, Schwartz, Seghier, Lazeyras, & Vuilleumier, 2005;Ryu & Chaudhuri, 2006), yet visual similarity between the adaptor and test is a critical variable in the magnitude of the FDAEs (Yamashita, Hardy, De Valois, & Webster, 2005) at least for unfamiliar faces (Hills & Lewis, 2012).…”

In the eye of the beholder-rating of facial attractiveness in adult asperger syndrome

“…Additionally, Rhodes et al described averageness as a "central location" in a distribution of faces rather than an "intrinsic appeal of particular physical characteristics" [40]. According to this hypothesis, facial averageness seems to be represented in the whole facial configuration, requiring a holistic perception.…”

“…Another factor for facial attractiveness is averageness [5,6]. Rhodes et al showed that sensed averageness thereby strongly depends on preceding experiences with faces [40]. For example, a short exposure to distorted faces is able to change the sensed normality of presented faces towards the distortion in non-autistic individuals.…”

From single cells to social perception

“…In the past decade, there has been considerable use of adaptation, employed both during psychophysical experiments and neuroimaging experiments, as a technique to investigate the brain mechanisms underlying face processing [55,[59][60][61][62][63]. In its most basic form, adaptation results from prolonged exposure to a stimulus that causes a selective suppression of the neurons that code that particular stimulus, sparing neurons that code different stimuli.…”

“…expanded) is shown repeatedly and subsequently a negative after-effect is induced, whereby normalshaped faces now appear contracted (e.g. [62]). Such effects can be contingent on facial characteristics (e.g.…”