Faces are a rich source of information, signalling a person's identity, their emotional state, age, sex, ethnicity, health, and attractiveness.

 

 

Faces are fascinating to most people, because they are so rich in social information.  They signal a person’s identity, feelings, age, sex, ethnicity and attractiveness.  How do we read all this information in faces?  And how does this information guide our interactions with others?  In the Facelab, we are studying perceptual, cognitive, neural, evolutionary and social aspects of face processing.  Current projects are concentrated in three main areas:

 

Attractiveness:  Adaptive Significance and Cognitive Mechanisms

We are investigating what makes faces and bodies attractive and how our perceptions of beauty may have been shaped by human evolutionary history.  We aim to determine whether preferences for averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism are biologically based standards of beauty and whether cognitive mechanisms might also contribute to them.  We are also investigating whether attractive traits reflect aspects of mate quality, such as health, fertility and genetic diversity. 

 

Face Expertise and the Other-Race Effect

 

We are all face experts, with a remarkable ability to distinguish thousands of faces, despite their similarity as visual patterns. However, we are more expert with some faces than others.  For example, people often lack expertise with other-race faces and find them difficult to recognize.  We are currently studying the perceptual, cognitive and motivational bases of this well-known other-race effect.  We are also studying how people acquire expertise with other-race faces when they move to a new country.

 

Applying the Psychologist's Microelectrode to High-Level Vision:  Face aftereffects reveal face coding mechanisms

 

Aftereffects have been called the psychologist’s microelectrode because they can reveal perceptual coding mechanisms.  Recently, a variety of aftereffects have been discovered in the perception of faces and bodies.  For example, briefly viewing a face biases us to see the opposite characteristics in subsequently viewed faces, suggesting that a face’s appearance is coded as deviations from an average face or norm.  Viewing consistently distorted faces rapidly changes what looks normal and attractive, suggesting that face norms are continuously updated by the diet of faces that we see. Similar aftereffects have been found in the perception of body norms and ideals.  We are currently using these aftereffects to explore how we perceive and respond to faces and bodies.

 

 

*FACELAB DATABASE link*

Please seek permission from Gill Rhodes before using these faces

 

 

For further information please contact:

Professor Gill Rhodes
School of Psychology
University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009
phone: 61 8 6488 3251
fax: 61 8 6488 1006
gill@psy.uwa.edu.au