Paired female and male composite faces.
Visual experience with one face can affect your perception of and even preference for other, similar faces. Such effects are often attributed to “mere exposure” (Zajonc, 1968; Bornstein, 1989; Rhodes et al., 2001), suggesting that the effects of visual experience are unaffected by the context in which viewing takes place. My current research, in collaboration with Ben Jones and Tony Little, is finding that the context of the exposure matters.
We recently published a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B showing that visual exposure to faces of one sex affects later perceptions of novel faces of the same sex more than faces of the opposite sex. These sex-contingent aftereffects provide evidence of separable neural populations that code male and female faces.
Prior visual experience with individual faces increases preferences for previously unseen composite averages of those faces (Rhodes, Halberstadt, & Brajkovich, 2001). Viewing a male or female face changes the point along a continuum that is perceived to be halfway between male and female (Webster, Kaping, Mizokami, & Duhamel, 2004). Experience with one's own face influences both perceptions of averageness and preferences for self-resembling faces (DeBruine, 2004).
I have found that the effect of experience with one's own face depends on the context of the question asked about self-resembling faces. When asked to judge the trustworthiness of other-sex faces, I found that men and women judge faces that resemble their own as most trustworthy, but when asked to judge the attractiveness of these same faces for a short-term relationship, men and women are averse to self-resembling faces (DeBruine, 2005).
Currently, We are exploring the extent to which the “reward-value” of the experience surrounding visual exposure to faces qualifies the effects of exposure. Composite images of individual faces experienced in a rewarding setting are prefered to composite images of individual faces experienced in an aversive setting.
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