Beauty is better pursued: Effects of attractiveness in multiple-face tracking

Abstract

Using the multiple-object tracking paradigm, this study examines how spontaneous appraisal for facial beauty affects distributed attention to multiple faces in dynamic displays. Observers tracked attractive faces more effectively than unattractive faces in this task. Tracking performance was only affected by target attractiveness, suggesting an absence of appraisal for distractor attractiveness. Attractive male faces also produced stronger binding of face identity and location for female participants. Together, the results suggest that facial attractiveness was appraised during tracking even though this was task irrelevant. Contrary to the theory that multiple-object tracking is driven by encapsulated low-level vision, our results show that the content of target representation is not only penetrable by social cognition but also modulates the course of tracking operations.

Keywords:

• Attractiveness
• Multiple-face tracking
• Attention

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from The Royal Society, KC Wong Education Foundation, and 973 Program (2011CB302201). We thank Professor David Perrett for offering the face stimuli and Emma Medford for her thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We especially thank the reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹ We thank Trafton Drew for suggesting this idea.