Face processing
When half a face is hidden, do we imagine it as more average?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When people imagined the hidden half of a face, they consistently pictured it as more average in shape than it really was, especially for faces that looked unusual.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Participants saw half a face and adjusted the missing half along a shape continuum from caricature (-50%) to anti-caricature (+50%, towards the same-sex average) to show how they imagined the real face; upper- vs lower-half condition between subjects
- N
- N=110 · 110 participants in the main task (56 adjusted the lower face, 54 the upper face); a separate online sample of 160 rated the 60 original faces for typicality or attractiveness
- Population
- Mostly young White adult volunteers and university participants in the UK, judging 60 White young-adult face photographs
- Outcome
- Morph percentage selected as 'how the person actually looks' (0% = original), and whether this shift was predicted by the face's perceived and geometrically measured typicality
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Key findings
Instead of choosing the true original, participants picked versions shifted towards the average: on average 19.16% of the way along the continuum for the lower half and 16.53% for the upper half, both very large effects. Faces that raters judged as less typical were completed with an even bigger shift towards the average, while the geometric typicality measure gave weaker and less consistent effects. Perceived typicality and attractiveness were strongly correlated across faces.
Methodology
The researchers showed 110 participants 60 photographs with either the upper or the lower half of the face blanked out. On each trial, participants used arrow keys to scroll through versions of the missing half that ranged from exaggerated (caricatured) to shifted towards the average face shape, and stopped on the version they thought matched the real person. A separate group of raters judged how typical and how attractive each original face was, and the researchers also computed each face's geometric distance from the average shape.
Limitations
The study did not measure attractiveness of the completed faces, so it cannot say directly whether masks make faces look more attractive; and because making a face more average also tends to make it more attractive, the authors cannot tell whether people imagined faces as more average specifically or just more attractive. Only face shape was morphed, not skin texture, and all stimuli (and most participants) were White, so the own-race average may behave differently for other-race faces. The upper- and lower-half conditions were not compared statistically because the study was not powered for that, and the task is an artificial lab procedure rather than real encounters with masked people.
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