Figure 1
From: Love at second sight: Sequential dependence of facial attractiveness in an on-line dating paradigm
(A) General procedure (arrows and labels are for illustrative purposes only and were not visible during the experiment). Stimuli depicted are examples of photographs taken of men who consented to have their images reproduced for scientific communication. 300 faces were briefly presented in a random sequence and participants made a binary attractiveness judgement about each one: attractive or not attractive. (B) Bar graph of main results, averaged across subjects (N = 16; error bars = ±1SEM). Horizontal dashed line indicates general attractiveness (mean attractiveness score for all faces averaged across all subjects). In the centre is the [t − 1] inter-trial effect, an assimilative effect whereby the attractiveness of a current face is higher when preceded by an attractive face and lower when preceded by an unattractive face. On the left is the [t − 2] effect, showing a weaker but still significant assimilative effect (t15 = 3.27, p< 0.005, paired two-tail t-test). As a means of control, we calculated the [t + 1] effect. As predicted, this produced a null result as the attractiveness of an unseen future face, whether attractive or unattractive, should not alter the attractiveness of the currently viewed face (t15 = 1.48, p = 0.16, paired two-tail t-test). (C) The distribution of responses (% of trials where the response was ‘attractive’) across the stimulus set (N = 60) as a function of previous-trial attractiveness. Green bars reflect the distribution of scores when the preceding trial presented an attractive stimulus (with an average score greater than a subject’s grand mean); red bars reflect the distribution of scores when the preceding trials presented an unattractive stimulus (with an average score less than a subject’s grand mean). (D) Time course of the [t − 1] inter-trial effect plotted over 10 intervals of 30 trials showing the effect of the preceding face’s attractiveness on the current trial was consistent across the entire trial block. The dashed horizontal line indicates general attractiveness as in panel (B).
