Abstract
It is now widely believed that the ability to recognize the identity (Etcoff & Freeman, 1991; Stone & Valentine, 2003), the gender (Schyns, Bonnar & Gosselin, 2002), the age (Deffenbacher, Johanson & O'Toole, 1998), the race (Ferguson, Rhodes & Lee, 2001), the emotional expression (Adolphs, Tranel & Damasio, 2003), and the attractiveness (Perrett, 2001; Rhodes, 2001) of faces is of primary importance for people to interact competently with one another. In everyday life, people readily make several other inferences about a person based on facial attributes (Nachson, 1995): e.g., about its thrustworthiness (Winston, Strange, O'Doherty & Dolan, 2002), neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (the last five are known as the “Big Five” personality traits in the literature). Despite the fact that these inferences could possess an adaptive value, they have received little scientific attention. Here, we asked 20 participants (10 females) to judge stimuli made of parts of 300 normalized color faces (150 females) along the six dimensions enumerated above plus two nonsense dimensions (i.e. usaldus and cekici) on a 10-point scale. Intra and inter-judge correlation was significant for all dimensions, including the nonsense dimensions. Prototypes of the information subtending the participants' judgements were constructed by regressing the stimuli with the average ratings.