Abstract
Though facial attractiveness perception attracted many researchers' interest, only a few studies have explored the relationship between facial attractiveness perception and spatial frequency, using a well-controlled experiment. Some studies focused only on the correlation between them, and other studies employed indirect methods in manipulating spatial frequency information, such as changing the presentation position or exposure time of stimulus rather than transforming the stimulus itself through a spatial-frequency filter. Whereas a number of studies have showed consistently that low-frequency information plays an important role in the perception of male facial attractiveness, it is not the case for female facial attractiveness. The current study performed experiments to examine which spatial frequency was more important for female face attractive perception. High-frequency and low-frequency filters were applied to female face photographs respectively and the attractiveness of each photo was evaluated. Based on this evaluation, the stimulus for the experiment was selected. They were assigned into one of beauty (high attractive both in high and low frequency), high-frequency beauty (high attractive only in high frequency), low-frequency beauty (high attractive only in low frequency), normal (low attractive both in high and low frequency) condition. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of hybrid images with overlapping high-frequency and low-frequency images of identical female model. The results showed that perceived attractiveness in the high-frequency beauty condition was higher than in the low-frequency beauty condition (beauty > high-frequency beauty > low-frequency beauty > normal). In Experiment 2, participants rated the attractiveness of the original photograph, which is a stimulus that can be encountered in real life. The results of Experiment 2 were consistent with Experiment 1. These results indicate that high-frequency information has a stronger influence than low-frequency information in the perception of female face attractiveness.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018