| dc.description.abstract | Facial attractiveness reflects the evolutionary value of individuals. Empirical studies have not only demonstrated the general components contributing to facial attractiveness, but also indicated that attractiveness preferences are shaped by life experiences. However, previous studies did not find an own-race advantage in explicit attractiveness judgments of faces. In contrast, a robust other-race effect (ORE) in the encoding and recognition of faces has been consistently shown, indicating better discrimination and memorability for own-race faces compared to other-race faces. Given the absence of the ORE in explicit judgments of facial attractiveness, we aimed to investigate whether the perception of the race of faces affects perceived attractiveness in implicit judgments without conscious face awareness.
Both the perception of facial attractiveness and face race have been suggested to be processed automatically and unconsciously in behavioral studies using the visual masking and continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigms. In the present study, we employed the two paradigms, in combination with simultaneous recordings of event-related potentials (ERPs), to investigate the perception of face race and attractiveness during early face processing in both subliminal/unconscious and supraliminal/conscious processing stages. In the visual masking paradigm, face stimuli are presented between forward and backward masks in order to prevent the processing of visual information from face stimuli before and after the face presentation. In the CFS paradigm, the CFS stimulus presented to the dominant eye renders the face stimulus presented to the other eye invisible at the beginning of a trial, and the duration the face needs to break into awareness is measured by the reaction time (RT) of face detection.
We first conducted two behavioral experiments to examine the relative processing speed of the race and attractiveness of faces for these two attributes to reach conscious stages during short face exposures of 100 ms or less in the visual masking paradigm (Experiment 1), and whether the two face attributes are unconsciously processed and interact with each other in the CFS paradigm (Experiment 2). Based on these two experiments, we further conducted two neurophysiological experiments (Experiments 3 & 4) to examine whether the effects of face race and attractiveness on behavioral responses arise from early face perception in both subliminal and supraliminal conditions.
In Experiment 1, participants showed sensitivity to the race and attractiveness of faces when the face stimulus was presentation for 33.34 ms, suggesting efficient processing of face race and attractiveness in explicit judgments. In Experiment 2, we found a significant difference on the face detection time between own-race and other-race faces under the CFS procedure. Also, the attractiveness of faces was positively correlated with the face inversion effect (FIE, the faster detection time for faces in the upright than in the inverted orientation) under the CFS, while this correlation was not significantly different between own-race and other-race faces. These face detection results suggest that face race and attractiveness are processed unconsciously, while the two types of processing do not interact with each other. In Experiments 3 and 4, we observed an interaction effect between face race and orientation on the N170 component under supraliminal conditions, suggesting that the encoding of face configuration is modulated by face race. However, we did not have strong ERP evidence indicating unconscious processing of facial attractiveness in subliminal conditions.
In summary, our behavioral findings suggest that both the attractiveness and race of faces are processed rapidly and unconsciously. However, our ERP findings in early face perception only showed the effects of face race in both subliminal and supraliminal conditions. We did not have strong neurophysiological evidence to suggest that facial attractiveness is processed in early face perception without conscious awareness. To account for these findings, we proposed a model which specifies the factors that affect the magnitude of the N170 component across unconscious and conscious levels of face processing when encountering own-race and other-race upright and inverted faces, and how visual masking and CFS may interrupt the neural mechanisms in visual pathways. | en_US |