Perceptual Advantage of Animal Facial Attractiveness: Evidence From b-CFS and Binocular Rivalry.

Junchen Shang,Wenfeng Chen,Hong Yang,Chengyu Wang,Lingya Zheng,Chang Hong Liu,Zhihui Liu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01670

Abstract

Research has shown that attractive human faces enjoy an advantage in both conscious and preconscious processing. Here we examined whether this preference for attractiveness is exclusive to human faces by measuring participants’ sensitivity to the attractiveness of cat and tiger faces. Experiment 1 measured the time taken to break continuous flash suppression (b-CFS), whereas Experiment 2 measured the dominant time in binocular rivalry (BR). The results showed that attractive cat faces were detected more quickly (Experiment 1) and dominated for longer time in visual awareness (Experiment 2). However, no effect of attractiveness was found for tiger faces in Experiment 1, while attractive tiger faces also dominated for longer time in visual awareness in Experiment 2. The results provide first evidence that the preference for attractive animal faces can be shown involuntarily or without apparent conscious control. The findings suggest that human preference for facial attractiveness may contain an aesthetic element rather than being a purely adaptive means for mate choice.

Highlights

Research has shown that humans’ fascination with facial beauty may have a strong biological basis, and the preference for attractive faces is already present at birth
Tigers are less accessible and are typically seen only on television, or in zoos and safaris. These factors may influence processing of facial attractiveness in these animals. With these questions in mind, the present study examined the effect of attractiveness in cat and tiger faces using the break continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) (Experiment 1) and the binocular rivalry (BR) (Experiment 2) paradigms
Further pairwise comparison (Bonferroni corrected) showed that attractive cat faces broke into awareness faster than average-looking cat faces and unattractive cat faces, ps ≤ 0.019

Summary

Introduction

Research has shown that humans’ fascination with facial beauty may have a strong biological basis, and the preference for attractive faces is already present at birth. There are two contrasting accounts for the preference: one sees it as an adaptive mechanism for mate choice (Little et al, 2011; Lindell and Lindell, 2014; Foo et al, 2017b) whereas the other treats it as a by-product of how brains process information (see Rhodes, 2006, for a review). Facial beauty is an honest maker of genetic quality, such as health and resistance to diseases, which implies an important role in mate choice. For example, as one of the contributing factors in facial attractiveness, appears to be associated with health and developmental stability (Zaidel et al, 2005; Fink et al, 2006; Foo et al, 2017a)

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