Wang Da, Luo Xu, Xiao Na, Mei Gaoxing
School of Psychology, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, People's Republic of China.
Department of Psychology, School of Education Science, Jiangsu Normal University, 101 Shanghai Road, Xuzhou, 221116, China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 Jul 9. doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03122-6.
Facial attractiveness is a crucial factor in social interactions. During the judgments of facial attractiveness, individuals not only can form the perception of single faces but also can extract summary statistics of multiple faces (i.e., ensemble perception). It is largely unknown whether and how recent perceptual history could have an influence on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness. Here we combined a facial attractiveness rating task with a linear regression model to address these issues. In Experiment 1a and 1b we found that attractiveness judgments of an ensemble of current multiple faces were significantly biased toward an ensemble of previous multiple faces (i.e., a positive serial dependence effect). Experiment 2 further demonstrated that this positive effect originated from the global ensemble perception rather than the local perception. Moreover, Experiment 3 revealed serial dependence effects between the perception of a single face and the ensemble perception of multiple faces. Taken together, these findings showed the positive effect of recent perceptual history on the ensemble perception of facial attractiveness, indicating that the ensemble perception of high-level visual features such as facial attractiveness is controlled by the serial dependence mechanism.
面部吸引力是社交互动中的一个关键因素。在对面部吸引力的判断过程中，个体不仅能够形成对单个面孔的感知，还能够提取多个面孔的概要统计信息（即整体感知）。目前尚不清楚近期的感知历史是否以及如何对面部吸引力的整体感知产生影响。在这里，我们将面部吸引力评分任务与线性回归模型相结合来解决这些问题。在实验1a和1b中，我们发现当前多个面孔的整体吸引力判断显著偏向于先前多个面孔的整体（即正序列依赖效应）。实验2进一步证明，这种积极效应源于全局整体感知而非局部感知。此外，实验3揭示了单个面孔的感知与多个面孔的整体感知之间的序列依赖效应。综上所述，这些发现表明近期感知历史对面部吸引力的整体感知具有积极影响，这表明诸如面部吸引力等高级视觉特征的整体感知受序列依赖机制的控制。
