Tracking cortical representations of facial attractiveness using time-resolved representational similarity analysis [article]

Daniel Kaiser, Karen Nyga
2020 bioRxiv   pre-print
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
more » ... lated to individual participant's 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.
doi:10.1101/2020.05.21.105916 fatcat:s3dv7v5lbrdtlfrltbmxxfxv5u