Fitting the mind to the world: face adaptation and attractiveness aftereffects

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Perception

Background:

• Facial attractiveness is often linked to averageness or prototypicality.
• Perceptual experience can influence judgments of normality and attractiveness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how brief exposure to distorted faces affects perceptions of facial normality and attractiveness.
• To explore the neural basis of these perceptual shifts.

Main Methods:

• Participants adapted to faces with consistent distortions.
• Normality and attractiveness judgments were measured using distorted and undistorted test faces.
• Adaptation effects were tested across different face orientations (90-degree difference).

Main Results:

• Adaptation to a distortion shifted perceptions of normality and attractiveness towards the distorted features.
• These aftereffects persisted even when adapting and test faces had a 90-degree orientation difference.
• Suggests adaptation of high-level, non-retinotopic neural representations.

Conclusions:

• Perceptual adaptation rapidly recalibrates facial preferences based on recent visual experience.
• Facial attractiveness may stem from prototypicality within a perceived distribution, not fixed features.
• These findings have implications for understanding social perception, mate choice, and social outcomes.