Judgments of Facial Attractiveness as A Dynamic Combination of Internal/External Parts

Although the importance of facial attractiveness has been widely researched, how attractiveness of internal/external facial parts and whole interacts in a time course of attractiveness judgment is still unclear. In our research, visual information integration in the facial attractiveness judgment has been investigated in a series of psychological experiments in which presentation of facial images to be evaluated their attractiveness was constrained spatially and/or temporally. Attractiveness evaluation of briefly-presented facial images demonstrated that 1) contribution of the eyes to the whole facial attractiveness judgment remains high even after short exposure duration as 20 milliseconds to the face, while contribution of other facial parts changed over time, and 2) either the gaze of the face is directed to or averted from the evaluator affected the dynamic integration of facial parts information to the judgments of whole facial attractiveness. Different experiments examining the influence of external feature on the perceived facial attractiveness revealed the mutual, but not symmetrical influence between facial attractiveness and hair attractiveness. These findings together suggest the dynamic feature of facial attractiveness judgment where information from internal/external features is integrated over the time while it is affected by social cue such as gaze direction of the face

Judgments of Facial Attractiveness as A Dynamic Combination of Internal/External Parts

Although the importance of facial attractiveness has been widely researched, how attractiveness of internal/external facial parts and whole interacts in a time course of attractiveness judgment is still unclear. In our research, visual information integration in the facial attractiveness judgment has been investigated in a series of psychological experiments in which presentation of facial images to be evaluated their attractiveness was constrained spatially and/or temporally. Attractiveness evaluation of briefly-presented facial images demonstrated that 1) contribution of the eyes to the whole facial attractiveness judgment remains high even after short exposure duration as 20 milliseconds to the face, while contribution of other facial parts changed over time, and 2) either the gaze of the face is directed to or averted from the evaluator affected the dynamic integration of facial parts information to the judgments of whole facial attractiveness. Different experiments examining the influence of external feature on the perceived facial attractiveness revealed the mutual, but not symmetrical influence between facial attractiveness and hair attractiveness. These findings together suggest the dynamic feature of facial attractiveness judgment where information from internal/external features is integrated over the time while it is affected by social cue such as gaze direction of the face

The role of eye movements in high-acuity monocular and binocular vision

The human eyes are always moving. Even during periods of fixation when visual information is acquired, a persistent jittering of the eyes (ocular drift) is occasionally interrupted by small rapid gaze shifts (microsaccades). Though much has been learned in the last 20 years about the perceptual roles of fixational eye movements, little is known about the consequences of their active control for fine pattern vision and depth perception. Using custom techniques for high-resolution eye-tracking and precise control of retinal stimulation, this dissertation describes three studies that investigated the consequences of controlled fixational eye movements for visual perception of fine patterns in two and three dimensions. The first study addresses whether fixational eye movements are controlled to meet the needs of a demanding visual task and their contributions to visual acuity. We show that in a standard acuity test, humans actively tune their drifts to enhance relevant spatial information and control their microsaccades to precisely place stimuli within the foveola. Together these eye movements contribute 0.15 logMAR to visual acuity, approximately two lines of an eye chart. The second study addresses the perceptual and computational impact of tuning ocular drift. We show that humans are sensitive to changes in visual flow generated by drifts of different sizes. Changes in sensitivity are fully predicted by changes in effective power of luminance modulations delivered by drift, suggesting that drift acts as a mechanism for controlling the effective contrast of the retinal stimulus. The third study addresses the impact of binocular fixational eye movements on fine depth perception. We show that these movements, specifically the opposing movements of the eyes (vergence), are beneficial for stereovision. In the absence of disparity modulations from fixational vergence, fine depth perception is significantly impaired. The research described in this dissertation advances the field in several fundamental ways by showing that (a) contrary to traditional assumptions, ocular drift is tuned to the demands of the visual task; (b) the precise spatiotemporal structure of the luminance changes from ocular drift predictably impacts visual sensitivity; and (c) stereoscopic vision is a dynamic process that uses temporal disparity modulations generated by fixational vergence.2024-02-02T00:00:00