Positive effects of recent history on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness

Abstract

Facial attractiveness is a crucial factor in social interactions. During the judgments of facial attractiveness, individuals not only can form the perception of single faces but also can extract summary statistics of multiple faces (i.e., ensemble perception). It is largely unknown whether and how recent perceptual history could have an influence on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness. Here we combined a facial attractiveness rating task with a linear regression model to address these issues. In Experiment 1a and 1b we found that attractiveness judgments of an ensemble of current multiple faces were significantly biased toward an ensemble of previous multiple faces (i.e., a positive serial dependence effect). Experiment 2 further demonstrated that this positive effect originated from the global ensemble perception rather than the local perception. Moreover, Experiment 3 revealed serial dependence effects between the perception of a single face and the ensemble perception of multiple faces. Taken together, these findings showed the positive effect of recent perceptual history on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness, indicating that the ensemble perception of high-level visual features such as facial attractiveness is controlled by the serial dependence mechanism.