Tomeo Olivia B, Ungerleider Leslie G, Liu Ning
Section on Neurocircuitry, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institutes of Health (NIH)Bethesda, MD, United States.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2017 Jul 11;11:129. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00129. eCollection 2017.
Facial attractiveness is a long-standing topic of active study in both neuroscience and social science, motivated by its positive social consequences. Over the past few decades, it has been established that averageness is a major factor influencing judgments of facial attractiveness in humans. Non-human primates share similar social behaviors as well as neural mechanisms related to face processing with humans. However, it is unknown whether monkeys, like humans, also find particular faces attractive and, if so, which kind of facial traits they prefer. To address these questions, we investigated the effect of averageness on preferences for faces in monkeys. We tested three adult male rhesus macaques using a visual paired comparison (VPC) task, in which they viewed pairs of faces (both individual faces, or one individual face and one average face); viewing time was used as a measure of preference. We did find that monkeys looked longer at certain individual faces than others. However, unlike humans, monkeys did not prefer the average face over individual faces. In fact, the more the individual face differed from the average face, the longer the monkeys looked at it, indicating that the average face likely plays a role in face recognition rather than in judgments of facial attractiveness: in models of face recognition, the average face operates as the norm against which individual faces are compared and recognized. Taken together, our study suggests that the preference for averageness in faces does not generalize to non-human primates.
面部吸引力是神经科学和社会科学中一个长期以来积极研究的课题，这是由其积极的社会影响所推动的。在过去几十年里，人们已经确定，面部平均性是影响人类对面部吸引力判断的一个主要因素。非人类灵长类动物与人类有着相似的社会行为以及与面部处理相关的神经机制。然而，尚不清楚猴子是否像人类一样也会觉得某些特定的面孔有吸引力，如果是这样，它们更喜欢哪种面部特征。为了解决这些问题，我们研究了面部平均性对猴子对面孔偏好的影响。我们使用视觉配对比较（VPC）任务对三只成年雄性恒河猴进行了测试，在该任务中，它们观看成对的面孔（两张个体面孔，或者一张个体面孔和一张平均面孔）；观看时间被用作偏好的衡量指标。我们确实发现，猴子看某些个体面孔的时间比其他面孔更长。然而，与人类不同的是，猴子并不比个体面孔更喜欢平均面孔。事实上，个体面孔与平均面孔的差异越大，猴子看它的时间就越长，这表明平均面孔可能在人脸识别中起作用，而不是在面部吸引力判断中起作用：在人脸识别模型中，平均面孔作为一个标准，个体面孔与之进行比较并被识别。综上所述，我们的研究表明，对面部平均性的偏好并不适用于非人类灵长类动物。
