Serial dependence of face attractiveness shares some properties with serial dependence reported in other domains. Serial dependence has been reported in the perception of orientation (Fischer & Whitney,
2014), position (Liberman, Kosovicheva, & Whitney,
2014), facial recognition (Liberman, Fischer, & Whitney,
2014; Taubert, Alais, & Burr,
2016), facial emotion (Liberman & Whitney,
2016), numerosity (Cicchini et al.,
2014), and more. For these feature domains, the assimilative bias follows a pattern where there is first an increase and then a reduction back to zero with increasing feature dissimilarity. Our results showed that serial dependence of perceived facial attractiveness also increased with increasing difference in attractiveness between successive stimuli. The absence of the trend back to zero may be accounted for by the limited attractiveness differences between facial images of one displayed identity. The temporal tuning is somewhat shorter here than in some previous studies (Fischer & Whitney,
2014; Liberman, Fischer, & Whitney,
2014). For example, Liberman, Fischer, and Whitney (
2014) showed that the perception of facial identity is pulled toward the one-back stimulus seen on average ∼7500 ms prior to the current trial face. Our results revealed serial dependence of facial attractiveness for stimuli seen up to 6 s prior. However, the tasks and timing differed between the current study and the previous ones, so comparisons should be made with caution. Taking the same example, Liberman, Fischer, and Whitney (
2014) used an adjustment task with a longer average delay between stimulus and response, whereas we used a scalar rating task right after the stimulus face. The density of trials per unit time was therefore somewhat higher in our experiment, and serial dependence in perception of different attributes might depend on delay as well as the number of intervening trials or stimuli (Fischer & Whitney,
2014). Further, an important consideration is that different features and object properties may have different autocorrelations in the physical world. For example, the attractiveness of a single face can change from moment to moment (Post, Haberman, Iwaki, & Whitney,
2012) but identity may be more stable. Therefore, if sequentially dependent perception mirrors the physical world, there may be differences in its temporal tuning (Taubert, Alais, & Burr,
2016).