RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Tracking cortical representations of facial attractiveness using time-resolved representational similarity analysis
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.05.21.105916
DO 10.1101/2020.05.21.105916
A1 Daniel Kaiser
A1 Karen Nyga
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/10/2020.05.21.105916.abstract
AB When we see a face, we rapidly form an impression of its attractiveness. Here, we investigated how rapidly representations of facial attractiveness emerge in the human brain. In an EEG experiment, participants viewed 100 face photographs and rated them for their attractiveness. Using time-resolved representational similarity analysis on the EEG data, we reveal representations of facial attractiveness after 150-200ms of cortical processing. Interestingly, we show that these representations are related to individual participants’ personal attractiveness judgments, suggesting that already early perceptual representations of facial attractiveness convey idiosyncratic attractiveness preferences. Further, we show that these early representations are genuinely related to attractiveness, as they are neither explained by other high-level face attributes, such as face sex or age, nor by features extracted by an artificial deep neural network model of face processing. Together, our results demonstrate early, individually specific, and genuine representations of facial attractiveness, which may underlie fast attractiveness judgments.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.