Facial typicality and attractiveness reflect an ideal dimension of face structure.

Autor: Trujillo LT; Department of Psychology, UAC 253, Texas State University, 601 University Dr., San Marcos TX 78666, USA. Electronic address: logant@txstate.edu., Anderson EM; Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keeton St., Austin, TX 78712, USA. Electronic address: ema1@iu.edu.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Cognitive psychology [Cogn Psychol] 2023 Feb; Vol. 140, pp. 101541. Date of Electronic Publication: 2022 Dec 30.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101541
Abstrakt: Face perception and recognition are important processes for social interaction and communication among humans, so understanding how faces are mentally represented and processed has major implications. At the same time, faces are just some of the many stimuli that we encounter in our everyday lives. Therefore, more general theories of how we represent objects might also apply to faces. Contemporary research on the mental representation of faces has centered on two competing theoretical frameworks that arose from more general categorization research: prototype-based face representation and exemplar-based face representation. Empirically distinguishing between these frameworks is difficult and neither one has been ruled out. In this paper, we advance this area of research in three ways. First, we introduce two additional frameworks for mental representation of categories, varying abstraction and ideal representation, which have not been applied to face perception and recognition before. Second, we fit formal computational models of all four of these theories to human perceptual judgments of the typicality and attractiveness (a strong correlate of typicality) of 100 young adult Caucasian female faces, with the models expressed within a face space derived from facial similarity judgments via multidimensional scaling. Third, we predict the perceived typicality and attractiveness of the faces using these models and compare the predictive performance of each to the empirical data. We found that of all four models, the ideal representation model provided the best account of perceived typicality and attractiveness for the present set of faces, although all models showed discrepancies from the empirical data. These findings demonstrate the relevance of mental categorization processes for representing faces.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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