Abstract
The human visual system can automatically form ensemble representations for not only low-level visual features such as size or orientation but also relatively higher-level visual features such as facial attractiveness. Interestingly, a previous study showed that people perceived the ensemble representation for a group’s facial attractiveness as more attractive than the statistical average of the individual member’s attractiveness. This phenomenon is known as the group attractiveness effect (GA-effect), and selective attention is considered its underlying mechanism. The most attractive person in a group gets more attention, resulting in that person’s attractiveness diffusing within the group. The current study explored whether the location of the attended face influences the GA-effect. If the GA-effect is based on a kind of attentional capture of the most attractive person, the attended person’s location would not influence the GA-effect. However, if the GA-effect is related in such a way that the visual system pays attention to spatial location, the location would have an impact. In particular, we are interested in the tendency that people are more likely to pay more attention to objects in the left visual field (LVF bias) than the right. Participants were asked to evaluate a group’s attractiveness after the presentation of three faces simultaneously for three seconds, which consisted of two faces with low attractiveness and one face with high attractiveness; the attractive face was presented on the left side, the middle, or the right side. When the attractive face was located in the middle, the group attractiveness was highest (middle > left > right). This result suggests that selective attention alone cannot explain the GA-effect, which is not consistent with previous results showing the importance of attention in ensemble representation.
Acknowledgement: 2017S1A5A8021943(National Research Foundation of Korea)