Categorical perception of human female physical attractiveness and health |
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| Authors: | Martin J. Tovée Laura Edmonds Quoc C. Vuong |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;2. PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;3. Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;4. Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing 400715, China;5. Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China;6. State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China;7. Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA;1. The Laboratory for Investigative Neurophysiology (The LINE), The Department of Radiology and Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Vaudois University Hospital Center, University of Lausanne, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland;2. Nestlé Research Center, Vers-chez-les-Blanc, 1000 Lausanne 26, Switzerland;3. Electroencephalography Brain Mapping Core, Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM) of Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland;4. The University of Tokyo, Organization for Interdisciplinary Research Projects, 1-1-1 Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8657, Japan;5. Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37232, USA;1. Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada;2. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA |
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| Abstract: | Using realistic three-dimensional female body models, we found evidence for a categorical perception of female physical attractiveness and health in male and female Caucasian observers. In a rating task, we showed that these bodies were rated for attractiveness or health in the same way as real bodies. In a two-alternative forced-choice task, we showed that these bodies were categorized into attractive vs. unattractive or healthy vs. unhealthy nonlinearly, which allowed us to estimate the position of a categorical boundary between attractive and unattractive or healthy and unhealthy bodies. In a delayed match-to-sample task, we measured the sensitivity of discrimination between pairs of bodies. We found significantly better discrimination for pairs that crossed the attractive/unattractive or healthy/unhealthy boundary than pairs that did not, even though the physical changes in both conditions were identical. Thus, categorical perception enhances the perception of physical changes that cross the boundary between discrete perceptual categories of important judgments such as attractiveness or health, which can be a cue for mate selection. |
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