When Beauty Breaks Down: Investigation of the Effect of Spatial Quantisation on Aesthetic Evaluation of Facial Images

Abstract

Research on the perception of facial attractiveness has been dominated by aspects of averageness, symmetry, and secondary sex characteristics of faces. Almost absent is systematic research on the spatial scale (coarseness) of detail sufficient to carry information about facial attractiveness. In the present study, subjects were asked to evaluate the attractiveness of faces while the coarseness of detail of the face images was systematically decreased. Subjects discriminated a set of attractive faces from the set of unattractive faces when the coarseness of spatial quantisation changed from 10 to 17 pixels per face. Some of the faces regarded as attractive had the steepest shift in the rating towards the more attractive end of the scale at different resolutions. Once perceived as attractive in the coarse scale of image resolution, the faces generally did not return to the unattractive group with a subsequent finer scale of description. No single critical scale of detail was revealed that would have dramatically changed the perception of facial attractiveness from uncertain to distinct.