Unconscious processing of facial attractiveness: invisible attractive faces orient visual attention

Abstract

Past research has proven human’s extraordinary ability to extract information from a face in the blink of an eye, including its emotion, gaze direction, and attractiveness. However, it remains elusive whether facial attractiveness can be processed and influences our behaviors in the complete absence of conscious awareness. Here we demonstrate unconscious processing of facial attractiveness with three distinct approaches. In Experiment 1, the time taken for faces to break interocular suppression was measured. The results showed that attractive faces enjoyed the privilege of breaking suppression and reaching consciousness earlier. In Experiment 2, we further showed that attractive faces had lower visibility thresholds, again suggesting that facial attractiveness could be processed more easily to reach consciousness. Crucially, in Experiment 3, a significant decrease of accuracy on an orientation discrimination task subsequent to an invisible attractive face showed that attractive faces, albeit suppressed and invisible, still exerted an effect by orienting attention. Taken together, for the first time, we show that facial attractiveness can be processed in the complete absence of consciousness, and an unconscious attractive face is still capable of directing our attention.

Filtered beauty in Oslo and Tokyo: A spatial frequency analysis of facial attractiveness

“…The eye-tracking results confirmed that the beautiful faces are strong attractors of attention [109], since participants spent about 10% more time dwelling onto the attractive face in a pair (Fig 5) than on the relatively less attractive one. It has been shown that the attentional priority towards attractive faces can also occur unconsciously [110] and that a decision about a face's level of attractiveness can be reached very rapidly (within 33 ms), and not very differently than when having unlimited time [111]. However, the present results are consistent with several previous studies showing that we typically spend extra time looking at faces considered attractive [112][113][114].…”

Sequential biases on subjective judgments: Evidence from face attractiveness and ringtone agreeableness judgment

“…Recent research has provided evidence that facial attractiveness can be processed in the complete absence of consciousness [ 36 ], on account of the fact that attractive faces enjoyed the privilege of breaking suppression and reaching consciousness earlier. Therefore, it’s not hard to understand why contrastive effect and assimilative effect exist simultaneously because they have totally different mechanisms.…”

“…Face attractiveness, which is of great importance in interpersonal interaction, is a holistic visual trait that we often use to make first-pass assessments of people as we associate this feature with romantic viability, sociability, and health (see reviews [ 28 ]). Sequential biases on face attractiveness were prevalent [ 29 – 36 ], but they were little understood. Experiment 1 aimed to primarily find out whether face attractiveness ratings made in sequence were influenced by the true attractiveness values of the previous faces and the ratings given to the previous face.…”

Continuous flash suppression: Known and unknowns

“…Furthermore, other bCFS studies showed that participants' own face (Geng et al, 2012, Experiment 1), faces with direct gaze (Chen & Yeh, 2012;Stein, Senju, Peelen, & Sterzer, 2011;Yokoyama, Noguchi, & Kita, 2013, Experiment 1), faces belong to familiar identities (Gobbini, Gors, Halchenko, Rogers, et al, 2013), faces oriented toward the observer (Gobbini, Gors, Halchenko, Hughes, & Cipolli, 2013) and faces, which are experienced in a congruent configuration (Moors, Wagemans, & de-Wit, 2016) overcome the suppression faster. In addition, Hung, Nieh, and Hsieh (2016) showed that in comparison to invisible unattractive faces, invisible attractive faces break the suppression faster (Experiment 1), have lower detection threshold (Experiment 2), and nonconsciously direct spatial attention (Experiment 3; also see Nakamura & Kawabata, 2018). Therefore, results from bCFS studies may indicate the survival of face recognition processes in the absence of awareness while employing CFS.…”