Desaturation-Induced Brightness in Face Color Perception.

Katsuaki Sakata,Hitomi Shimakura

doi:10.1177/2041669519854782

Katsuaki Sakata, Hitomi Shimakura

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669519854782

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Abstract

The distinctiveness of perception of face from nonface objects has been noted previously. However, face brightness is often confounded with whiteness in the beauty industry; few studies have examined these perceptual differences. To investigate the interactions among face color attributes, we measured the effect of saturation on brightness and whiteness in both uniform color patches and face images to elucidate the relationship between these two perceptions. We found that, at constant luminance, a uniform color patch looked brighter with an increase in saturation (i.e., the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect occurred), while in contrast, brightness of a facial skin image looked less bright with increased saturation (i.e., contrary to the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect), which suggested this interaction of color attributes was influenced by top-down information. We conclude that this inverse effect of saturation on brightness for face images is not due to face recognition, color range of the skin tone, the luminance distribution, or recognition of human skin but due to the composite interactions of these facial skin factors in higher order recognition mechanisms.

Highlights

Facial Attractiveness and Its PerceptionHumans are social animals that use facial expressions to recognize and communicate many types of information
A one-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that both brightness and whiteness significantly increased with higher lightness—brightness: F(2, 38) 1⁄4 587.81, p < .0001; whiteness: F(2, 38) 1⁄4 89.78, p < .0001—which indicated that face color was perceived as brighter and whiter with increased lightness of face images with the same chromaticity coordinates
We examined the effects of luminance on brightness and whiteness perception of faces and confirmed that both could be judged precisely following luminance variation in the first experiment

Summary

Introduction

Humans are social animals that use facial expressions to recognize and communicate many types of information. It has been reported that perception of an attractive face is an unconscious process (Hung, Nieh, & Hsieh, 2016), which involves a relationship between efficient facial processing and the neural system’s preference for this type of stimulus (Tagai, Shimakura, Isobe, & Nittono, 2017). It is believed that facial attractiveness is fundamentally important for humans (Haist & Anzures, 2016; Ohmann, Stahl, Mussweiler, & Kedia, 2016), and it has been reported that skin tone strongly influences perception of emotional expressions (Minami, Nakajima, & Nakauchi, 2018) and facial attractiveness (Coetzee et al, 2012). It has been reported that incremental increases in redness (CIE a*) are associated with perceptions of a healthier face (Stephen, Law Smith, Stirrat, & Perrett, 2009; Thorstenson, Pazda, Elliot, & Perrett, 2016).

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