Automatic Change Detection of Human Attractiveness: Comparing Visual and Auditory Perception

Change detection of social cues across individuals plays an important role in human interaction.

Here we investigated the automatic change detection of facial and vocal attractiveness in 19 female participants by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). We adopted a 'deviant-standard-reverse' oddball paradigm where high- or low-attractive items were embedded as deviants in a sequence of opposite attractive standard stimuli.

Both high- and low-attractive faces and voices elicited mismatch negativities (MMNs). Furthermore, low-attractive versus high-attractive items induced larger mismatch negativities in the voice condition but larger P3 amplitudes in the face condition.

These data indicate that attractiveness can be automatically detected but that differences exist between facial and vocal attractiveness processing. Generally, change detection seems to work better for unattractive than attractive information, possibly in line with a negativity bias.