Abstrakt
Existing research indicates that the shape of various facial regions is linked to perceived attractiveness and perceived formidability. Interestingly, there is little evidence showing that people actually focus on these specific facial regions during judgements of attractiveness and formidability and little support for the notion that the levels of attractiveness and formidability affect raters’ visual attention.
We have employed eye tracking to examine visual attention (the number of fixations and dwell time) in 40 women and 37 men while they assessed 45 male faces in life-sized photographs. The facial photographs were grouped by varying levels of attractiveness and formidability (low, medium, high).
Our results show that regardless of the characteristics rated, both men and women paid the most visual attention to the eyes, nose, mouth, and forehead regions. We found statistically discernible variation in visual attention in relation to the rater’s sex or target’s attractiveness levels for other facial features (the chin, cheeks, or ears), but these differences may not be substantial enough to have practical implications.
We suggest that the eyes, the nose, and the mouth regions play a central role in the evolution of face perception as regions most salient to the acquisition of informative cues about others. Further, during both attractiveness and formidability judgements, men looked longer at the stimuli than women did, which may hint at increased difficulty of this task for men – perhaps because they compare themselves with the stimuli.
Additionally, irrespective of sex, raters looked marginally longer at faces with a medium level of formidability than at those with a high formidability level, which may reflect ambiguity of these stimuli and uncertainty regarding assessment. We found no other relationships between the target’s attractiveness and formidability level in the context of visual attention to whole faces.